


Eighth World Wonder

by AnHeiressofaSOLDIER



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 00:39:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5765041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnHeiressofaSOLDIER/pseuds/AnHeiressofaSOLDIER
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Max's brother, Ben, had become a notorious murder: something that Max had had to learn early on in life, as well as to shoulder that burden. She tried to hide these facts-as well as any odd things about herself-for a long time; she had thought that she was doing pretty well in life. But after said brother's mysterious death, a "Logan" ends up causing a new destiny for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Max Guevara was busy doing makeup for a certain girl in the mall—as was her job, though it wasn’t something the woman liked in the slightest—and so as she was smudging some foundation onto the customer’s face (having a bit of a flashback about how in the past, it had been blood off of her brother, Ben’s, hands, so that no one would figure out what he did) she didn’t notice when a police officer began heading her way.

When she did end up noticing it, though—his reflection being made known through the casing of jewelry just beneath where she worked—she instantly went on the defensive.

She stood up, slowly—some of the rogue she’d been holding, a gift from Original Cindy, who had taught her how to do this in the first place, falling out of her hands and clattering to the tie-dyed rug beneath her as she did so—and held her hands in the air.

Max had learned long ago to wear jackets stained with paint smears on them—as well as to wear her hair in a messy bun—so if such a moment were ever to occur with her, the police would most likely think she was some sort of artist. And so when she held her hands up, they wouldn’t see anything suspect, but only try and imagine why she wasn’t holding paint brushes at the moment.

…This man, however, didn’t seem like he was going to fall for the trick so easily. He pushed his glasses closer to his eyes, from where they’d begun to slide down his nose, and Max prayed to every god that she could think of that this person was only feigning something, like she was, and wasn’t truly an intellectual.

“Umm… Selene, honey,” Max told her customer, while placing a gentle hand on her shoulder; she thought that action was probably truer of her than calling anyone “honey”, or even calling this girl by her actual name, as she thought it was a retarded one. “I mostly got your makeup done for you for prom, but I didn’t have time to finish your eyeliner. Frankly, I don’t think you need it—don’t think anyone needs it—but if you want… you can tell the manager to take it out of my pay for not keeping that promise to you. But in any case, you need to leave now.”

And the high school girl, Selene, surprisingly didn’t have to be told twice. She scampered out without even a word, though she did seem to gaze at the spot on her shoulder that Max had been holding it, wonderingly.

So either she was a lesbian, Max thought—and therefore maybe someone she should have been getting the number of for Cindy—or a hopeless romantic, because now she was looking between Max and the strange officer back and forth as she ran, as if imagining there was some sort of torrid affair that had happened between the two of them in the past and she didn’t want to get in the way of it now. How charming.

“What can I do for you, officer?” Max asked, preparing to play the game, as she laid a scarf over where Selene had just been sitting down. As the officer had been approaching her, he’d been pretty far off, and so Max knew there was a chance he hadn’t seen Selene at all.

And now… now she meant to keep it that way, so he wouldn’t go after her, as she prepared to make it look like the young girl had never really been there at all.

The man, with the somewhat spiky hair, didn’t seem to buy it, though. Instead, he began perusing through the racks of cheap Christmas knick-knacks that were before Max (a weird place in the store for them to be, she thought, but then again… perhaps the store owners would stop at nothing to make sure someone from any walk of life could buy something this holiday season), and then he said the words that ended up damning her:

“Don’t get me wrong… and not to sound stereotypical, but I don’t see someone like you working at a makeup counter, and no: it’s not because you’re an ‘artist’,” he countered what Max had been about to say, as she held one finger in the air and prepared to flaunt her shirt. Now she could only frown as he continued on, and get worried and more worried as he made it clear that he knew very much.

“It’s because brunettes are usually the smart ones, the ones with opinions, and so shouldn’t you be saying how the makeup industry makes girls hate themselves, and buy things for a beauty they already have, instead of working at one?”

“Shouldn’t that apply to you, too, then?” Max sniped, knowing from past experience that she should’ve just kept her mouth shut, but being unable to do so, when she took in the man’s spiky brown hair, as well as his piercing light-colored eyes that seemed to speak to her of a scholar.

“Anyway, if you don’t mind me,” Max continued on, as she took in the man’s awe-struck—and slightly offended—face; she thought she maybe sensed a time to run for it now, as she so often had in the past, but just as she was about to, the man caught her shirttail and caught her.

“I wouldn’t do that, Max,” he cautioned. And at once Max swiveled on her feet, turning to face the stranger, as a sense of dread was released within her. How did this stranger know her name? And why did she get the sense that, no matter what she did now, she’d be taken away and not be able to do anything about it?

If for nothing else, Max was glad that one of her curls ended up whipping the man in the face as she’d spun. She wanted to truly assault him, of course, but she figured that accidental way would be the only thing she’d be able to do so and still dream of getting away with it.

“You’re no officer,” Max said at once—surprising herself when she heard the truth in her own words, and pulled her shirt out of his grip with a light tear. “It’s true that black was once the color of the police force here, I mean, but it sure as hell isn’t anymore. It’s blue: a color you don’t seem to be wearing, despite how well it would look with your eyes.

“Anyway, unless you have a warrant—or a reason to hold me—I’m leaving on my break now, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

With that, Max started sprinting—not running, because she still wanted to somewhat maintain the idea that she was good—towards the north entrance of the shop, just as she had wanted to all along. The light shining through the glass doors there seemed to be calling to her—which was a bizarre thing for Max to think, seeing as how she much more thought she was a creature of the night, but it was what it was.

Max weaved through the many people that were looking at clothes all about her, and even ripping some off of mannequins when they couldn’t find their proper sizes on the racks—she even had to make her way through many a people who were looking at her slack-jawed, no doubt having become interested in her argument with the fake cop—but to the exit she finally did make it.

The Guevara girl pushed her way through—hating the harsh winter air that was coming towards her now, despite the sun outside that had made it appear warmer—and she almost found herself wondering if maybe she’d have had better chances facing the Cale boy (for, looking back now, she could see that he had a nametag on him that read exactly as that), but then she read that the last letter of his first name was an “N”, and having had quite enough of that letter, Max made her way out.

…

“Kendra, I’m home,” Max called out, the moment she literally kicked her way into the shabby apartment that she shared with her girl friend.

The good thing about Kendra? She didn’t make people wait usually, which was something Max could appreciate since most girls weren’t like that.

It had been that way since they’d met, when Kendra—trying to get money on the street—had sold to Max the way that one could make homemade toothpaste: something that Max had needed reliably then.

And so, going out on a limb, she’d asked Kendra if she maybe wanted to be roommates with her. And now here they were, two years later, the best of friends… though Max would have never have said as much through such flowery words.

“Oh, hey, Max,” the blonde, somewhat heavy-set, woman said, as she entered the living room from her own doorway that was covered in beads. “How was wor- You have that look on your face again. Do you want to play Scrabble and vent out your feelings some, then?”

Kendra really did know her surprisingly well, Max thought. She didn’t know _everything_ —nothing about Max’s brother, certainly—but she knew enough now to understand that the things that Max couldn’t do or say normally (because of said brother) she found a way to do through scrabble.

“Yeah, that would be great, Kendra. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go use this over shirt as a rag to clean my motorcycle.”

And feeling completely aggravated, Max moved to do exactly that. The paint stained shirt she wore to work? She only ever wore it _to_ work. In reality, it wasn’t Max’s style in the slightest, and she only ever dealt with it to try and keep out of trouble: like she’d tried to do today to no avail.

And now… As far as she knew, this stupid top was cursed—and would lead to that “Cale” getting a warrant to come over here and arrest her—so Max very strongly wanted to burn it, but she’d make do with turning it into something that aided her motorcycle, Asia.

“Max, wait!” Kendra called for her, her scratchy—yet surprisingly soft—voice screaming for Max, as she moved out of the apartment—her hand moving outward to try and catch her, it seemed.

Max watched on at the scene, out of Kendra’s view, with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m confused. You hate the cold. Why would you… First off, why would you take your outfit off _before_ you get to, Asia? That’ll just make you chillier. But moreover… why would you get rid of it at all?”

To that, Max awarded Kendra, by letting her see her again, and shrugging her shoulders she related that, “What can I say, Kendra? I have split personalities, don’t I?”

Kendra paused, and didn’t reply right away. Max wondered if it was because she noticed how dumb it was that she would ever say anything as a question—like she was some stupid schoolgirl, looking for approval—but deciding she wasn’t going to dwell on it (or how Kendra was correctly realizing how all over the place she was today), Max headed towards their garage.

Truth be told, she was feeling kind of lazy right now, so she wouldn’t clean Asia, then. She did end up draping the art shirt over the bike for future use, though.

Dusting her hands on her pants—and preparing to go back to play games with Kendra, and pretend that work wasn’t a thing—Max tried her best to forget all about Logan Cale, but, of course, her endeavor wasn’t that easy.

Because on some of the metal interior of the garage, a section that looked too much like their own at their old home for Max’s liking, was a bloody handprint that was exactly the size of a teenager’s.

Max assumed it was a teenager’s anyway—as she began panicking and breathing heavily, sinking to the ground below her as her legs gave out, and praying that Kendra wouldn’t come to see her now—or at least the hand of a very small adult’s: it was exactly the clue she’d first found that had led Max to realizing Ben was a murderer to begin with.

But Ben- that bastard was dead now, so had Max recreated the scene with paint during one of her fits, or-

She didn’t… she didn’t have time to dwell on this.

Feeling suddenly ashamed of herself, as Max had thought her anxiety attacks were a thing of the past, she swiftly got to her feet, breathed in deeply, and began heading back towards the apartment.

Though Max usually hated that the area she lived in with Kendra was so run down that she had to step on massive rocks to get anywhere—so massive, in fact, that they often even tore holes in her shoes—she was glad for it at this moment: the slight pain they caused, and her having to focus on that, anchored her to the present.

And it was for that reason that the sister of a serial killer was able to get her wits about her—climb up the scaffolding on the back of the green brick building—and enter her home again, as if nothing at all was wrong.

“Oh. Hey, Max. I didn’t know you were here. I should have, though, in seeing that Kendra’s setting up for Scrabble—something she never does if not prompted, and-”

“Hey, Zack,” Max cut off her friend’s far too savvy and technical word vomit. But that was just Zack for you.

And once upon a time, Max had liked Zack greatly—it was hard not to, what with his messy, and somewhat greasy, blond hair that made it look like he was a normal person who’d had the luck of turning into a model, and not the other way around. And his blue eyes that spoke of kindness to the few people he cared about, but showed distrust for anyone else, was also nice—but she’d grown cold of his methodical and tempered ways.

Like right now? He was setting up for what was no doubt to be a very enjoyable game night, but what did he have on the wooden table instead of desserts and chocolates? Pretzels.

Max glared at them, but really she was thinking of much else and feeling put-off for reasons that had nothing to do with the salty snacks.

…Okay, so that wasn’t completely true. Back when Max had been worried she’d been living under scrutiny, constantly being watched, she’d chosen to eat the healthiest things anyone could ever dream of—something about believing if she were to become a fatty, and eat unhealthily, people would become more suspicious of her—worried for her, perhaps—and check in.

Max had long ago given up on such subterfuge, and had instead learned that acting less like a kid had probably made her seem _more_ suspect. So now she didn’t give a fuck about _what_ she ate, though she mostly did eat fattening things in order to make up for last times.

That, and she just really liked sweets. And fortunately, she had the body and metabolism that could stand for it.

“Dude,” Max told Zack, taking a seat in the wooden chair at the end of the table, and surprising herself somewhat by how blasé she sounded right now. “Zack. It’s okay to indulge every now and then, y’know? If you can’t eat delicious things during a party, when will you ever have the excuse for them?”

To that, Zack blushed and Max instantly became on guard because of it. There… was a part of her that had wondered/worried in the past if Zack might actually have known more about her than he said, and that _that_ was why he was after her affections.

After all, he had just ended things with Max’s friend, Syl, and was now dating Kendra: both people who were much better than Max was, and definitely more the “girlfriend” material. Why Zack would possibly think of passing them up, in favor of acting like a schoolboy with her—something that didn’t impress her at all—Max didn’t know. She could only figure he was being less than honest.

“To be fair, Max,” Zack countered—just as Kendra came back into the room, seeming to be towel drying her hair off (how long had she herself been gone then, Max wondered worriedly?). “I didn’t know that you were going to be here tonight. I thought it might be just Kendra and me, and the two of us _like_ pretzels. If you want me to go get some other foods, though-”

“Zack, stop acting like a golden retriever, will you?” Max snapped, keeping a careful eye on Zack all the while that she said this. Right now he seemed to be smiling genuinely, but she got the sense that his smiling teeth could probably figuratively turn into fangs and snarling in any moment. There was just something about Zack that she didn’t trust.

And for that very reason, Max slipped her feet underneath Zack’s chair and began pushing it further away from her own. She played it off like she’d just been stretching her legs and had had the misfortune of accidentally sending Zack further away across the carpet, but that really wasn’t the case at all.

And when Max would look back on it in the future she’d come to regret it, because as it happened… her action there was exactly what had ended up prompting Kendra to speak of Max’s day at the mall and just what it had cost her.

“Oh, right!” Kendra muttered, slapping her hand on the table as a thought had seemed to return to her, though she oddly spoke it rather calmly.

Idly, Max wondered if that was why so many people seemed to like Kendra—just as she herself did—because she was certainly never disinterested in things, but she seemed to have a bit of calm about her that would be good in a crisis… Kind of like Max herself these days, if she was being honest.

“Max… I have some bad news for you. While you were out working on Asia, the store you worked at called. They seem to think you broke something at work, and that you need to come in and talk about it. I tried to tell them that that was a load of bologna—because even though I’ve thought your muscles must brim with strength in the past, you seem to be more delicate with things than anyone I know—but they were adamant about it. I’m sorry, sweetie.”

Despite what Kendra had just said, and the kind way in which she had done so, Max felt like she was about to contradict her, because surely the way she was now holding onto the table so tightly must have been worrying holes into it.

She hadn’t meant to tell Kendra—or Zack, for that matter—what had happened to her at work today at all, but now she seemed unable to stop herself. “They call leaving a piece of fabric on a chair ‘damaging’ something? Those bastards. I should go there and beat them up, and give them something to _really_ complain about.”

As Max was saying this, she ended up grabbing her cap from a side table and stuffing it onto her head. Whenever she felt especially like being a rebel (weird for her, she knew; shouldn’t she have tried to be a saint to make up for Ben? Lately, though, she just felt angry all the time, and how it made her panic!) she would find the thing and wear it.

Zack, seeming to understand her mood even more than Kendra did—as he began putting the name Kendra on the Scrabble board, something Max was glad for her, as it reminded her that not _all_ people with an “N” in their name were awful; but ugh. Just speaking of “N” Cale now was upsetting her—because he said rather helpfully, “Is it Normal riding your ass? Because I seem to recall that he rather liked me a lot. I could go there and complain for your benefit, if you want.”

Max was almost tempted. And even worse, she very nearly thought about trying to take Zack back then—because if Ben had taught her nothing, he had at least taught her that no one should waste time in life—but she held it in, reminded herself she was a better person than that, and placed her baseball hat even further down onto her head, to remind herself to be untraditional.

“Thanks, Zack, but no. I mean, even kids learn not to have parents fight their own battles, for goodness sake! I’m going to go settle this myself, then, and so I’ll see you losers later.”

She had no idea at all that what she was really doing was playing into “Cale’s” hand.


	2. Chapter 2

Max ended up needing a ride from her friend Original Cindy: a lesbian African American woman—who called everyone beau, despite if they were male or female or if they were into her—so in other words… she was Max’s best friend. Also someone who was making the Puerto Rican girl feel a lot better after her terrible day.

In fact, Max even was even smiling now—enjoying herself a little bit—as the two of them sat in the car together, talking about gum flavors of all things.

“So for this contest,” Max started, already starting to hate where she was going with this—for she knew the response she’d no doubt get from her friend—but being unable to stop herself, because it was just too truthful. “I think we should tell Wrigley’s to make a new flavor—chicken—and to use all of the proceeds from that to help a sister out, seeing as how I’m probably going to have to give my entire salary, and then some, to convince Normal not to fire me for fucking leaving a piece of out.”

By the end of her statement, Max was feeling angry again. And here she’d thought that being around Cindy would wear that fury down a little, but apparently she’d been wrong.

Not wanting to give Original Cindy the impression that she hated _her_ , or anything like that, Max began leafing through the glove compartment in the car, just for something to do to keep her mind off of things.

Original Cindy, to be expected, wrinkled her nose the slightest bit at Max’s suggestion, before she became super focused on trying to merge into another lane of traffic. so that she could get into the mall’s parking lot. “I know that they’ve pretty much done every other flavor under the sun, but that sounds like a nasty flavor, beau. I’m sorry. I know you love it, and you know I love you, but that’s just the truth.”

Max stuck her tongue out at her afro-d friend, choosing to think of the slight tanned color that was her favorite food—and far removed from the almost cranberry red she’d seen earlier in the day; how very much she needed to stop thinking about that1—and how she’d had much weirder gum flavors in the past, like one that wasn’t _supposed_ to taste like cabbage but somehow did.

“You come up with something then, Cynthia,” Max quipped, starting to go through the user manual for the car they were in, to try and zone out already, so that she could end up doing the same when she inevitably started getting yelled at in just a bit. “I’m going to need the money, seeing as how I bet Kendra’s going to move out with Zack so-”

Max’s word, that ironically would have ended with a letter “N”, was cut off as her cell phone started ringing.

Mystified, Max dug the device out of her pocket—not recognizing the number or sound that it was making at all—as she shared a questioning look with Original Cindy.

“Hello? This is Max Guevara. How can I help you?” Max began uncertainly, unconsciously shifting back into the Goody Little Two-Shoes she’d acted whenever anyone had asked her about Ben.

“Max? I don’t know if you remember me, but it’s Zane.”

At once Max wanted to yell at the guy that she, of course, remembered him, because he was her landlord, after all.

In fact, Max was about to tell him as much—and damn the consequences—as her bullshit limit had about reached its max-capacity for the day, but his next words ended up shutting her up.

“I’ll take your stark silence as a ‘yes’, and just pray that I haven’t already Fd something up.

“Moving on, you might remember that before I became this building’s super, I used to work on cars and bikes and garages and the like. I was even in the business of selling garages to some people who needed them… The reason I’m calling is because there’s a guy here who wants to buy your storage unit. And if it’s no big deal to you, I’ll tell him ‘yes’, and give you most of the money from it. But if it’s _not_ okay with you, I’ll just go now, and you can pretend this never happened.”

For just a split second, Max had been prepared to give him the go ahead. She’d just been having a conversation with her best friend about needing money, hadn’t she? So who cared at all if she ended up with less space? Out of her and Kendra, she was the only one who used the garage at all, and she knew she could always find another place to work on Asia…

Fortunately, Original Cindy snapped her out of it. And she did so by giving Max wrong information—that she didn’t k _now_ was wrong, of course—and unknowingly reminding her of the major reason that she couldn’t let anyone near the place at all:

“Uhh… Max? I can’t completely hear everything on my end over here, but it sounds to me that your man’s-man of a landlord is trying to get you to sell your property? Well, for one thing you shouldn’t, because that’s just plain stupid. And for another, doesn’t Ben—whenever he visits you—like to work on projects there? You may be giving your favorite brother a reason to ignore you, if you do this.”

Oh, god. How had she forgotten that she may have, in some fit, killed someone the exact same way that Ben had in a worst case scenario?! So there was no way in hell that Max could let anyone anywhere _near_ that garage!

“I think I’m going to have to agree with my colleague here, that you no doubt just heard,” Max snapped at Zane.

Meanwhile, Original Cindy was proving she was the best friend ever, by parking and staring down Max’s boss, who was standing outside and tapping his lip impatiently.

“Tell this client, or whoever, to find better ways to be rich and to stop oppressing the poor.”

While it was clear that Zane didn’t tell the mystery person those colorful words at all, he had seemed to tell him that the area was not for sale: something that Max was hugely grateful for.

…Until Zane proved himself to be a terrible negotiator by coming back on the line and admitting, “So, I told the guy to book it, but he’s not moving, and is now even walking closer to said storage facility.”

Max, promising herself she wouldn’t panic, decided not to focus on the bad things right now, but rather how she was going to come up with a _truly_ good new gum flavor—enter the contest in Cindy’s name—and then win the money, and give it to her bestie, for chauffeuring her around town all day.

Normal, as far as Max was concerned, could suck it.

…

Cindy made good on driving Max back home a good portion of the way. But somewhere down the line—when they’d ended up in a sort of forest area with a lot of technology from a bygone era in it: a sort of shortcut the two of them had discovered for emergency situations long ago—Max decided it would be best if she just roughed it and jogged home the rest of the way.

Cindy, after all, had her transgender girlfriend to get back to, and Max didn’t want to keep her away from her love for too long.

But mostly? Max got a strange feeling—that she wished she had gotten during all of the Ben chaos, so that she maybe never would’ve opened that cellar door that had started all of this—that she needed to go about things this way, and keep Original Cindy as far away from the impending situation as possible.

Spilling out of the car—and giving her best friend a sort of half-assed answer, about how she wanted to go running like some of the flock in Maximum Ride had often had to in those books—she took off.

Fortunately, Max had a compass in hand, so there would be no issue about her getting lost… but apparently her getting somehow blistering hot was something she was going to have to consider.

How she felt like she was suddenly dying of heat, when she hadn’t run much at all (she hadn’t even gotten to some of the knee-length grass up ahead, towards the middle of the curvy trail), and it was winter weather outside, Max didn’t know. But it was definitely something that was happening to her now.

Stopping for a moment—and bending over with her hands on her legs to try and catch her breath—Max tried to decide whether or not she’d made a mistake, and if there was still some hope that she might be able to double back and get to Original Cindy’s car on the highway… she highly doubted it.

And it was at that exact moment that she ended up seeing it: a hang-glider towards the north of her, that looked like it would carry her most of the way out of the forest, and then towards her apartment.

Surprisingly enough, Max wasn’t completely sure that she wanted to go on the thing. It wasn’t so much that she _wanted_ to keep running—no, Max knew for sure she that didn’t want that, as she pulled a hair tie off of her wrist, that she’d used as a bracelet, and put her tresses up; otherwise it had been swinging down and irritating a skin tag that she’d recently gotten—but rather there was a part of her that wanted to go into the little meadow with the tall grass.

Max wanted to spite her brother that way, for it was a family trip to a similar location that had made him go mad, she thought.

_“Ben… what are you doing? And why are you looking at my cut leg?”_

_“Sorry, Max. Sorry if I’m weirding you out. The way the cattail tore your leg up is kind of fascinating, though. It put a few, spaced hurts into your leg, instead of just one large one. And it-”_

_Even served in make your blood spray out some_ , Max easily remembered her brother’s next words from that day, though she wished that she didn’t.

There was something that didn’t make sense at all about that day, back when Ben had been eleven, and herself eight, Max thought.

And it was something that came over Max even _moreso_ , when she decided to leave all thoughts of plants behind her, and to head towards the zip-line.

After Ben had said his awful words to her that day, Max had seen the world around her starting to shimmer and even fade in and out. She’d been knocked unconscious, and had dreamt of _something_ , but she couldn’t be sure exactly what.

Now, however, as Max put one of her hands through the hole in the back of her hat, so that she could hold onto the handlebar _through_ the hat, and not injure it too much on the rusted piece of junk—it seemed to be happening to her again:

Max ignored the feeling and started climbing the ladder before her, anyway.

She ignored the awful intuition she was having now, and how she always seemed to be zoning out these days, and…

She made her way to the top of the monument, grabbed onto the handlebar, let her body plummet some, and then she was _flying_.

And… and seeing some sort of thing that had nothing to do with her or her brother at all.

In fact, it was nothing Max had even seen before, so was it some sort of story she’d just come up with, then, or-

Thoughts like this kept Max from freaking out about how she could fall and break a bone at any moment. With how haphazardly she was holding onto her current life support and all, it even seemed a general rule that she should fall off now, as she screamed.

But somehow that didn’t happen. Somehow, she was okay.

_“So, you mean to tell me you built this amazing contraption and you still can’t fly?”_ said a stern voice to a little, tanned kid, who seemed to be trying to put on glasses to look smarter, as his shoulders slumped at the authority figure’s abuse towards him.

_Man, am I tripping,_ Max thought, getting to her feet and running out of the woods’ exit and to her apartment.

She shook her head to get rid of the thoughts that had just plagued her, but somehow she knew she’d have to face them all again far too soon.

…

“Aww, man. You’ve _gotta_ be kidding me,” Max all but growled, when she noted who was standing in front of her garage: Mister Cale himself.

Really, Max supposed she should’ve guessed it would be the false police officer who was continuing to investigate her, but she had somehow been hoping that the two situations were unrelated.

_This_ would serve to teach Max to never have hope again.

“Yo, Zane. Will you get the feds up in here? This guy can’t be trusted, so I’d really appreciate it if you’d do that,” Max said, as she put a gentle hand on her friend’s shoulder and tried to act like she was much calmer than she was actually feeling.

Zane didn’t have to be told twice. In no doubt realizing this entire situation was his fault, and so only he could make it right, he ended up sprinting to his apartment building much faster than even Max—determined as she was—had been able to make her way back to this place.

“That’s some nice attire for the dead of winter, Miss Guevara. Does your blood often boil like so?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Max asked, crossing her arms over her chest and trying not to make it look like this guy’s racist comment had bothered her like it did.

At least… Max _thought_ he was trying to be discriminatory, anyway.

“Look, ‘Logan’—if that’s even your real name,” Max said viciously, to try and make it sound like she was much too upset to be reveling in finally knowing his full name, for it was right there on his nametag, and how she’d be able to look up stuff about him later. “Today you’ve broken all kinds of laws, so why don’t you get out of here before this turns into an ugly situation for you, money or no money.”

So, Max wasn’t entirely paying attention to what she herself was saying now. For one thing, she couldn’t say for sure if Logan Cale was filthy rich or not; it was just a feeling she got, but what mattered was distracting him while she tried to place herself between him and the storage space.

If she could make him forget about it, by any stretch of the imagination, she’d certainly sleep better tonight, but Logan was having none of that.

“Except I never once even hinted that I was a cop, Max. _You_ , at first, thought I was attempting that, but really I wasn’t, so I can’t go away for fraud.

“Also, it was your landlord here who tried to sell your rights to me today. Not the other way around. I didn’t even know this is where you lived. I was just following up on something a reliable source told me, about how when this garage has been opened in the past, they think they’ve seen a bloody handprint.”

_Except that that’s not possible_ , Max thought, _because I’m in there all the time, and_ I _only just noticed it today. And if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s insane. So I’m guessing you’re bluffing, and that Zane showed you the interior right after I left. Fuck. It looks like I might have to get a lawsuit about_ him _now._

“I’m sure you’re right, Logan Cale,” Max began to lie for the first time in years, and how she hated herself for it! She was no longer lying in a sugary sweet manner, it was true, but she was lying all the same; and if Max could’ve even moreso cursed her brother to the fiery furnace, she would have.

“Because I let my favorite person in the world—my niece, Jondy—come here often. She probably colored in the garage without me knowing it, or something, so what you saw is probably really harmless.”

There must have been something in her face then, Max would discover later. Because choosing to drop all pretenses, Logan moved closer to where she was now blocking the evidence, and whispered in her ear, “I know you weren’t involved at all with what your brother did, Max. Your secret’s safe with me, but you should know… you should know that Ben’s still alive, and that he’s at it again.”

How one could feel such relief and anxiety at the same time, Max didn’t know. Because on one hand… she’d never been happier, even if her legs _had_ begun shaking.

She didn’t even know this stranger, and yet… And yet he’d made one of her wildest dreams come true—something she’d never once thought could happen—by telling her that he knew about all of her demons, but that- but that he didn’t blame her for any of it, and that he wasn’t going to tell anyone.

But on the other hand, he was also playing out one of her greatest nightmares, by telling her that Ben was back.

Most people who were related to serial killers? Max had read online about them that most wished to ask their former loved ones why they had done all that they did, but Max couldn’t care less to know. Ben getting the chance to try and defend himself was a luxury he didn’t deserve. And if he ever had tried for it, Max had always thought she might’ve killed him herself.

So now… Now that he was supposedly back, would that idea of hers come true? Would she become a murderer, too?

And if she did… would hers be justified?

Max decided to play it cool. Partly because she noticed Zane, Zack, and Kendra were now coming her way, with a cell phone in hand (for some unexplainable reason), and so she didn’t want to alert _them_ to what was going on.

But also because she didn’t know if she could trust this Logan Cale guy, or his sanity, as far as she could throw him.

Poking him in the shoulder some, as she decided to try and play it all off—just as some snow began falling from overhead, chilling her exposed skin from where it had been burning just before; how odd—Max ended up saying, “There you go again, playing a cop today, buddy.

“For a long time, those peops thought my brother—and by extension, my family and me—were involved in shit, but they could never prove it. And I think you’ll find that you have a harder time proving it now. Also, you’re obviously insane, and-”

“I think you know better than anyone that I’m not making the things I know up, Max. Your brother’s alive. And what’s more is that he’s somewhere else, killing more people, because he’s trying to link different places together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note that this story is a mystery, so you won’t be able to figure out everything that’s going on right away. It will all make sense eventually, though. That I can promise you. 
> 
> And I hope you guys are liking what you’ve been able to discern so far:) 
> 
> Also, please tell me that you guys get the Maximum Ride joke. LOL.


	3. Chapter 3

Max hadn’t really believed Logan Cale’s wacko explanation—that he’d only slightly explained to her—but when he had invited her over to his penthouse suite to discuss it, she hadn’t been able to say no.

If he tried anything, she knew she could handle herself, but really… Max could see in Logan’s eyes that he, at least, believed what he was saying and only had discussing that in mind.

The real reason she went with him, though? A majority of Max’s life so far had been about her choices being taken away from her, or her being too scared to do something, so now that she was being given the option to actually choose for herself and act, she was going to take it.

And so she rode in a car with Logan back to his house—silent most of the time, as she tried to figure out just what she’d find when she got there.

Max wondered if there’d be models living with him and that kind of thing, and if—clearly being made from money—Logan made certain that no one bad looking could get anywhere near him.

When Max actually got to the brownstone type apartment, though, she quickly learned that that wasn’t the case. Rather, his neighbor seemed to be an elderly lady—that the aristocrat was kind enough to give some of the apples that he had bought he bought when he saw her—who had to use a walking cane to maneuver about, but still managed to have a pep in her step.

“You’re good to her, aren’t you?” Max asked after the woman had left, though it really wasn’t a question, as Logan tried to put his key into the door to unlock it.

At first it was clear that he had no idea what she was talking about, because he turned to her with a raised eyebrow and like he was half ready to question her.

But then Max could see understanding pass over him, his eyes alighted along with a slight smile on his face, he replied. “Yeah… Mrs. Moreno has been known to have some… suicidal tendencies in the past. She hasn’t adjusted well to some of our new technologies. I’m afraid that after her husband died, she seemed to somewhat give up.

“And so sometimes…. Sometimes when she wants to do something, but is without a clue how to do so, she beats herself up. And so I started learning that if there’s anything _I_ can do to help lighten her load, I’ll do it.

“Buying her apples, since she doesn’t know how to drive; turning up some classical music on my computer for her to hear, since she doesn’t know how to use her own CD player: you name it, and I’ll do it. A sweet old lady like that shouldn’t have to suffer.”

Though it was true that Max and Logan hadn’t known each other that long, but it was certainly the biggest speech that she had ever heard him make.

She wondered, then, if maybe Logan was secretly a social justice fighter, but since she still didn’t really know him, she decided not to ask.

She also decided not to compliment him on all he’d just told her, though she really wanted to, so instead just nodded her head and followed after him into the apartment.

It was certainly beautiful, that was for sure, but somehow it was more barebones than Max had thought it would be:

There were no outlandish collections that only rich people would have enough room for.

The kitchen—though certainly with a color scheme Max could appreciate, what with its brown wooden floors seguing up into a maroon color—wasn’t overflowing with foods or utensils there.

And even Logan’s apparent computer, that laid behind a glass paneling, looked completely normal, with nothing out of the ordinary to touch on with it.

Taking off the coat she’d grabbed before she made this venture, and sitting down on the black leather sofa, in what Max could only assume was the living room, she finally found something worthwhile to comment on. “A ‘Little Mermaid’ storybook? And I get the impression it’s not because you have a young relative you were reading to, but rather because you’re going to use it as some sort of example, huh?”

Logan Cale blushed at Max’s words, and that was all the answer that she needed. She rolled her eyes.

See? Logan’s explanation, that he’d barely just gotten into before she had come over here, was that Ben was alive but in another world.

Naturally, Max’s first thought about this had been that Logan was just another paranoid wealthy person, who didn’t get enough fresh air or human interaction, and so had gone crazy, believing in aliens and all that bullshit.

But then he started talking about a way that one could link worlds, by causing some of the same things to play out in each parallel world, and she’d been somewhat sold by that.

Not that she believed him even the slightest bit; don’t get her wrong. But at least he actually seemed to _somewhat_ know what he was talking about, and had some scientific facts backing it up.

It was also… a bit curious that Ben had always been talking about the story of Ouroboros when they’d been younger, something that Logan was somewhat hinting at now, but Max knew it had to be more coincidence than anything else, and that it was all way too much science-fiction for her.

“If you start using the fact that the sea witch, Ursula, used the idea of ‘other worlds’—or, rather, the land—to get Ariel to turn off her inhibitions and become her prey, I’m out. To be sure, it’s something my sister, Tinga’s, daughter, Jondy, would love to hear, but-”

“Rest assured then, Max Guevara, that I’m not going to be talking about ‘The Little Mermaid’ at all. That little booklet’s just here because I was entertaining my nephew earlier.

“Anyway, what I want to talk about is how I think you’ve seen flashes of things that are really coming from memories your other selves have from other worlds.”

At once, alarm bells started going off in Max’s head. It was true, of course, that she had been seeing some weird visions her whole life. She’d seen a great many (that she’d tried to forget) today, after all.

And before Ben had become crazy—and Max had become terrified that everyone would think she was the same way—she’d gone to the doctor about some of the stuff she’d seen.

 

How the hell did Logan Cale even know that, though? Either he was just a _really_ good guesser, or something was up.

Deciding it would be best to neither confirm or deny his words—as a kindly African American man came into the room, gave both of them a glass of tea, and sent a certain look Logan’s way—Max instead decided to focus on logistics. “Look… I’m not saying that the idea of parallel words is completely out of the question, since there are clearly things that no one can explain, but I still think the chances of them existing are slim to none.

“Mainly because they also have to deal with time travel, too, because by reason… each parallel world is similar to another until a certain point. Just the reason for _that_ , could open up a can of worms that even scholars dedicated to try and figure this all out wouldn’t want to get into.”

“Don’t think he’s insane, Miss,” Logan’s apparent assistant cut in then, as he smiled at Max kindly. “Logan’s been able to win over the most narrow-minded about this whole subject. Me, his physical therapist, a certain police officer that was having none of this… I think that you’ll find he’s highly credible and can be very convincing when he wants to be.”

There was something about the warmth this man exuded that Max liked. Logan Cale seemed like a good person, she guessed, but also one who got way too hung up on world affairs. She even had to wonder if he read the newspaper every day and teared up in trying to imagine a way to make the world better.

But coming from this man—“Bling”, Max guessed, because he seemed to be mouthing that that was his name to her now, as she mulled this all over—she could almost believe it.

“I guess you’ve added one point Logan’s way,” Max allowed, as she took a sip of her raspberry-lemon tea, savoring how much better it made her feel on this nasty day, “but you could give him another one by telling me who this mysterious police officer is.”

 _And if you can tell me why Logan needs a fitness instructor at all, when he seems perfectly fine to me, but asking that’s probably going a little too far for our “first date”,_ Max thought.

To her question, Logan audibly sighed—seeming to hint all too easily to Max that he wasn’t going to give away any of his sources that had asked to remain anonymous, but it once again seemed up to Bling to save the day… and to succeed in helping Max like Logan a lot more than she had initially.

Bling himself already felt like a friend to her.

“You’d better tell her, Logan. You desperately need her help and all,” Bling told him, as he took the opportunity to take a seat in a chair on the opposite side of the room of them.

Hanging his head a little, and forming his hands into the shape of a steeple, Logan seemed prepared to do just that.

And Max, internally, prepared herself. Despite being the one who had asked this subject to be brought up in the first place—as she needed to know whether or not Logan was chummy with some officers that she personally hated—she suddenly felt nervous that the subject would be changed to the task force she’d been trying to dodge for most of her life.

“Yeah… I guess I do. I’ll tell you the man’s last name is Sung, but that’s all I’ll give you. We met because he’s my government contact. I have a little hobby of trying to look out for the downtrodden, as you might have guessed, and he helps me with that.

“Anyway, the subject came up when he started telling me he was seeing doppelgangers of people, who were supposed to be in jail, out on the streets. Naturally, he’d panic and think that some of the prison mates had gone AWOL, and so would work to bring them back in…

“This only ever happened one time. When Sung brought the doppelganger man back to the precinct… and saw that the man he thought he’d been looking for was still behind bars, and when both men ended up meeting they disappeared.”

Max had suddenly gone cold. Not so much for the story itself—as far as Max was concerned, it was a ridiculous notion, even if Logan and Bling both seemed to believe it—but because Sung was someone that she knew. Someone that she knew all too well, and whose word was pretty much law to her.

He’d been the one… The one when Max had been a confused fifteen-year-old—who had had no clue what to do with what she had just found out about her brother, or how to cover it up; really, she knew now that trying to cover it up then had been her biggest mistake, because naturally people would’ve looked at it and thought she was involved then, but at the time she’d had no idea what else to do—had figured out that all the murders happening around her and Ben’s house were _coming_ from Ben.

Fortunately, for Max’s half-sister, Tinga’s, sake (though Max actually really hated her for it), she’d moved out of the state just a few years back, in having become knocked up with Jondy, so she hadn’t been incriminated.

Max herself, though, hadn’t been so lucky.

…Except. Except that for, whatever reason, Sung had seemed to look into Max’s soul and to truly see her for the scared little girl that she was. He’d understood immediately that she wasn’t in league with her brother—and that she really wanted to forget that everything about him had ever existed—so he’d promised to cover up her slight involvement from his fellow officers, provided that she’d help to bring her brother in.

And so Max had: something she’d blocked from her mind now, really, but she’d succeeded in getting Ben into prison. And he had been there for three days before his sudden death.

Or so that had been reported, anyway. But now… now these people were saying that that part of the story wasn’t true.

Deciding she didn’t want to give up all of this crucial information, but that she needed to quickly cover her tracks before both men saw how white she’d become and put it all together, Max quickly came up with something to help change the direction of the conversation. “Okay, fine. This… this Sung guy believes your crackpot theory, but that hardly explains why you think that I should just on that. Or why you even started believing it, Logan, when you weren’t there to witness any of that, and had only his word to go off of.”

Logan shrugged, which wasn’t something Max had expected from him at this point, so maybe he did have a clear answer about it, then.

And picking up “The Little Mermaid” book again, he seemed to absentmindedly begin flipping through it while relating that, “Remember those visions I talked about earlier? I sometimes get them, too. They’re never really clear. In fact, that weird effect going on in ‘The Little Mermaid’—the vortex created when Ursula’s stealing Ariel’s voice, that is—seems to turn up and fog them up for me. But it was never a question of me believing Sung or not. I always knew that something was going on, and that I was somehow seeing into another reality. But what do you think about all of this, Max?”

The truth was that she was starting to believe all this nonsense, for whatever reason. She remembered something her brother had said to her once… about how they’d been born into better lives than what they had now, and that he was going to do anything to get them back for them again.

If what he’d said then really meant anything—who could believe the words of a mad-man, anyway?—or if it had anything to do with the tale that Logan was spinning currently, Max didn’t know.

She decided, then, to just enjoy some of the paintings that Logan had on his walls—one even breaking the fourth wall and being punny, in an oil pastel, with the painted person in it saying “Oil say nothing gets past you”—and find something else to say, because really this was all hitting a little too close to home for her.

“That conversation we were having just a little bit ago, when you called me hot-blooded. What? Were you implying not about my heritage, then, but that maybe a me in another world felt blistering all the time, and that that was why it was somehow effecting me?”

The silence and slight nod she got from Logan then was enough of an answer for her.

So Logan wasn’t a crude, racist jerk at all, then. That made Max warm up to him just a little bit more, even if she wasn’t really buying what he was saying at all.

“I’ll were asking, Max,” Bling cut in then—which was good, because Logan seemed to be eyeing her intently for whatever reason; what? Was he trying to pretend that he liked her, so that she’d help him out, or something?—“is that if your brother tries to contact you, like we think that he will, that you let us know right away, so that we can track him.”

That she could agree to, at least.

Standing up and shaking Logan’s hand—who seemed to be acting much more himself now—and then Bling’s, Max insisted that, “That’s easily something I can do. If he returns in my life, I want him carted off to prison like he deserves to be… but I don’t exactly want to call the cops, either, so if that happens I’ll leave dealing with that to you guys.”

Feeling somehow a lot better—and also more scared and uncertain—than she had in a long time, Max said goodbye to the two men, after exchanging phone numbers and the like, in case she thought of a place that Ben might be likely to try and rendezvous with her.

…

When she got back home—after having regretfully accepted a ride home from Logan, something she somewhat regretted, because she didn’t want to be like Ben in thinking she deserved more than she actually did—Max was surprised to find that Zack had already gone home, having to work early at his analyst job, apparently, and that only Kendra was waiting up for her.

Max supposed it made sense that Zane wouldn’t want to see her, because he was probably praying to every god he knew that she wouldn’t put up a lawsuit against him, but it still would have been nice to know that a _few_ people cared about whatever craziness had inspired her to get into a car with someone she was having a massive argument with.

At least Kendra cared, Max realized, as the woman ended up pulling her into a hug the moment she got in the door.

Cindy also cared about her, Max thought. Later, she’d definitely have to call her best friend and let her know what was going on.

“Max… Oh my god! What happened?! We were all so worried about you, thinking that the guy maybe hypnotized you to get you to go with you, or something. What-”

“It’s fine, Kendra,” Max admitted, stepping past her friend to put her coat and hat away. She was oddly feeling kind of happy. Mainly because she’d made a new friend in that Bling guy that she really liked, so when she turned back to face her roommate she had a real smile playing out on her face…

In her eyes, anyway. It was still hard even now to ever get her lips to truly grin. Max suspected, though, that she probably looked nothing more than wild to Kendra. Best to try and settle down now, then.

“Anyway, it was all a misunderstanding. We’re keeping our garage, and Mister Logan Cale will never bother us _here_ ever again,”

_Because if anything, I’ll probably go over there to discuss Ben, I guess._

And it was exactly when Max ended up thinking about her disgusting older brother that the other shoe ended up dropping.

“Oh… okay, I guess. I’m glad that that’s settled. But Max… there’s a problem, then. While you were away, your sister dropped by. I didn’t know what to do except to tell her the truth. She’s really worried about you, so you might want to give her a call.

“But there is some good news! You know that new science that’s allowing parents to somewhat be able to pick their children’s traits? Well, she and her husband decided to try and do that and to have a son somewhat like Ben, seeing as how you all lost him at so young.”

“Yeah, Kendra… That’s… that’s great,” Max gave Kendra the answer she was longing for, as she stepped into her own room to put some of the earrings she’d been wearing away.

Once the door closed behind her, it took every ounce of will power that Max had within her to not start sobbing so loudly that Kendra would hear her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kendra seems to be being nothing more than a bearer of bad news in this story thus far. Uh-oh!
> 
> And I hope you guys are enjoying this story: the things I’m keeping canon, the things that I’m not, the things that are close to canon, and just everything about this story, really:D
> 
> And, yes. There will be parallel worlds in this story, because that’s somehow where this fic ended up going, but I’ll try to keep it pretty simple and to have it keep that Dark Angel flare there :)
> 
> So, I suppose now would be as good a time as any to say that anything from Season 2 will probably be very minimum in this story. Tbh, I didn’t like S2 at all (and I often pretend that it never happened) for reasons I won’t bore you guys with. The only redeeming thing about S2 for me is Alec, but since Ben is in this story… I’m not sure if Alec will make it into here at all. 
> 
> Sorry to disappoint, S2 fans! I truly am. And if- if this is a deal breaker for you, and you want to leave, I say go ahead and I’ll understand completely. Really^_^ But for those who favor S1, or don’t mind that S2 stuff might not be featured here, I hope that you’ll stick around;)
> 
> So… I usually write chapters that are five-thousand words minimum, but I’m not doing that here for change (which probably means that this story will have more chapters in the long-run), but I hope you guys like this style, and that it’s working. I’m enjoying the change, and being able to stretch my writing wings a little, so hopefully you guys are liking this choice of mine, too!
> 
> Thanks for reading, everyone! Until next time!^^
> 
> Edit: I don't remember them ever showing what Logan's place looked like from the outside, but I could be wrong...


	4. Chapter 4

It was raining outside of the two girls’ apartment, which Max found only fitting, as she desperately searched through her laptop for any records of family members of a serial killer becoming that way themselves.

Fortunately, she didn’t see anything that hinted at all that that sort of gene could be passed on, so she tried to remain optimistic that Tinga’s son wouldn’t end up being like his uncle at all, but she was still worried.

Max debated about calling Logan, as she deleted her search history and looked absently out the window, because anyone who wore a name tag—to inspire trust from a person they were first meeting—probably had a good handle on understanding someone’s psychological background, she thought, but in the end nothing ended up happening.

Instead, the ex-makeup counter girl (because she held onto no illusions that she’d somehow been able to keep her job, after ditching Normal) wondered if she should call Tinga and finally tell her what was going on.

And so Max attempted just that, and who ended up answering the phone but Jondy?

The moment the little twelve-year-old realized that it was Max she was on the line with, she instantly began telling her of some of the races she’d won at school.

That instantly put a smile on Max’s face, despite the many panic attack she’d just been having, because it impressed her so much that someone who actually rather hated running did it anyway, in order to challenge herself.

What was even more impressive than that, though? That Jondy did it all while wearing a dress. The girl definitely had mad skills.

It even sort of made Max jealous, because she’d long ago lost any sort of girly tendencies she might have had—as she’d tried so long and hard not to stand out—and now even somewhat frowned upon such things.

But Jondy was the perfect mix of athleticism and femininity, thought Max, proving that you didn’t have to sacrifice one to be good at the other.

Honestly, Max was even starting to think she might need to take a leaf out of Jondy’s book, which was why she probably ended up asking, “Hey, Jondy? I’ve got kind of a weird question, honey: I just got fired from my job, and I was wondering if you’ve heard of any job openings that I might could apply for?”

“I sure have, Max!” Jondy pretty much screeched through the phone—and as she did so, Max had to pull said device away from her ear, lest she go deaf, proving that even the people you loved the most could also drive you up the wall. “My school’s looking for a new librarian. Would you be able to help with that at all?”

A librarian… now that was a thought. Not that Max thought she had much the personality for it, but she was pretty well-read, and so she thought she could probably do that job if she had to.

“Yeah… that sounds great, Jondy. I’ll come to your school tomorrow and talk to your principle, then. Thank you so much.”

Max hung up the phone then, took some pills to make herself fall asleep—and not be able to think about certain things—and was lost to oblivion.

…

As it ended up turning out the next day, the middle school wasn’t exactly looking for a librarian for the first time, so much as they were looking to fill in the shoes of a lady who was retiring.

The “lady” wasn’t even that old, Max saw, as she came walking into the kids’ space—that had small- heighted bookshelves in every corner of the room, and a giant Big Bird statue—but instead someone almost her own age, it looked like.

She looked to Max that she might be part African American and part Caucasian; whatever the case, she had the most beautiful long and flowing black hair that the Guevara girl had ever seen in her life.

As she ended up approaching her, at the same time that she ended up knocking a ton of “Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree” books off the shelf, Max found herself cursing that she would have to try and take over after this woman.

Clearly, the faculty here wanted eye candy, and Max for sure didn’t think she qualified as that.

As she counted to ten in her head—a trick she’d learned long ago to try and keep herself calm—Max debated going about her gum flavor idea again, and splitting the money between Cynthia and herself, but upon remembering that one had to link their Facebook account to the contest entry site, Max decided that that wasn’t the best idea.

For obvious reasons, she tried to keep her social networking imprint to a minimum.

“Hi,” said the soon-to-be-former-school-librarian, as she strode over to shake Max’s hand. “You must be the Maxine Guevara who called yesterday. Why don’t you sit down, and in just a minute I’ll come back and interview you? I’m Jace, by the way.”

And just like that, as she breathed a breath of relief at this woman’s easy air, Max found herself liking Jace a lot. Mainly because it seemed they shared a camaraderie in that they’d both been named boy names.

So sitting down in a neon-green little chair that was much too small for her—and under an equally too small neon-green table—Max decided to listen to her predecessor.

It ended up taking a while for Jace to indicate to Max that she’d be with her soon. As it turned out, it seemed to be story time for one of the classes, and so Jace was reading “Tears of a Tiger” to some poor junior high students that had no idea what they’d gotten themselves into with that book.

Max listened to some parts of it—the part where the little brother tried asking his older sibling why they’d killed themselves always got to her—but mostly she just did origami with a piece of paper she’d found on the table, and tried to decide what to say for her interview—especially if, God forbid, the school ever found out about her connection to Ben and wanted to fire her because of it… she needed to make herself likeable enough that nothing like that could ever happen, hopefully.

And it was exactly when she was thinking about Ben that he ended up making his presence in her life again.

At first Max didn’t notice him at all. She just saw someone leaning down to pick up the books that she’d haphazardly knocked over, as the binding had seemed so fragile that Max herself hadn’t wanted to risk hurting them further, but it soon became clear to her that the person kneeling in front of her was far too big to be a student.

At first Max wasn’t even worried about it. She thought that maybe this was the teacher who had dropped the current class off, come to pick them up again.

She even got excited in thinking that maybe Jondy’s own homeroom would be the ones to join her next period, but then the stranger ended up turning her way where he sat—holding one of the books in hand as he did so, as he grinned at her—and Max’s heart stopped.

In most stories, Max assumed that the hero would stop to pinch themselves in such a situation, to see if they were perhaps dreaming, but Max did no such thing. Her talk with Logan and Bling had somewhat readied her for this possibility, after all, so the moment that Ben’s face looked even the slightest bit sinister, she ran.

Thankfully, Ben ended up following her that day—which wasn’t a good thing for Max herself at all, but later she’d look back and realize how happy she was that he hadn’t been able to hurt all the children this way—and he still carried the book in hand as he did so.

“Max, will you wait?!” Ben shouted, no doubt getting the attention of all the teachers who had classrooms in the basement area that they were in.

In fact, someone close to the stairs she’d been heading towards was opening their door now, and since Max couldn’t deal with questions at the moment, she started heading back the other way, moving past Ben and darting as fast as her legs could carry her to the stairwell at the opposite end of the hall.

“All I’m wanting is for our family to get some measly scraps, just like everyone in the kids’ story I’m carrying got the Christmas tree most perfect for them. Is that too much to ask for?!”

Suddenly finding that she couldn’t control her anger any longer, Max threw the jacket she’d been wearing over Ben’s face—because thankfully it was warmer today, and she wouldn’t be needing it at all—and once she felt he was disoriented enough, she finally made her way up the black, cracking stairs.

Hopefully Ben wouldn’t catch her _now_ , or boggle her mind moreso in trying to gain her sympathy…

Max was heading right to the cafeteria now, and down another set that would lead right to the Fruitopia machine, when she realized that coming towards this area might have been a mistake.

She had just led Ben to Jondy, who was in the café, getting a drink to eat with the pizza her mom had brought for her.

Max had had no way of knowing that the little redheaded girl would be on her break now, but that didn’t keep stop her from blaming herself for it, when Ben finally caught up to her and made his way over to Jondy—putting a hand on the little one’s shoulder, as he did so.

“Uncle Ben!” Jondy exclaimed, her excitement in seeing the uncle who had become “estranged” from her surpassing the joy she felt in seeing her aunt, it would seem. “What are you- what are you doing here?! Did you come to see the front page I’ve made up for the school paper, by chance?”

A cold sweat taking over her, Max knew she needed to steer the conversation in a way that would lead Jondy to safety now. “Actually, Jondy, your Uncle Ben is here to help me get the library job. We’ll both catch up with you after school, okay? Now run along now, or you’ll be late for class.”

Max didn’t think it was so much that Jondy cared about her warning that she ended up listening to her, but rather that she had orchestra right now and didn’t want to miss it.

She went off with one of her friends that seemed to also have that class next—Vada, if Max remembered correctly—and then she was gone.

Instantly, Ben started going in the direction that she had—out the door and to the more recently built part of the school building, as it were—but Max cut him off.

She didn’t want to do this. If she had the choice, she would have much preferred to dart far away from him again—as Max was fairly certain that she was seeing something glint in his hand right now—but she thought better of it, knowing that protecting Jondy was the most important thing in the world.

Max pushed Ben hard in the chest—so roughly, in fact, that he ended up toppling over completely, which was perfect, because Max had had no other idea on how she might’ve kept him from heading after the two girls—and she snarled: “You asshole. Stay _away_ from the kids! You wanted me to listen, so I’m listening now: explain whatever the hell you were talking about, before I choose to pull the fire alarm on your ass and save us all from you in that way.”

Slowly, ever so slowly, as if he expected a rebuttal on her part, Ben got to his feet.

He glared at his sister levelly, upon trying to clean up the blood she’d made seep from his lip, and Max couldn’t have been happier for that.

“Oh, come on, Max! These kids are reading a book about someone their own age who died! Surely you see that that’s karma. Surely you see that that’s a sign that one of them _should_ die!”

Max decided not to dignify that awful response with an answer in the slightest. Instead, she thought long and hard about how she could stall Ben and get the blade out of his hand...

Despite how much she wanted to, Max knew that she couldn’t antagonize him right now. He was far too close to the Fruitopia machine, and for all she knew… maybe he could even throw the knife down the money slot and get the whole machine to explode, or something.

So it was best to continue acting, and perhaps be the sister he’d always wanted her to be, though she hated just thinking of it.

“I just,” Max said, spinning past Ben to guard the machine herself, though she did so in a sort of seductive way, as if she, too, was excited about the idea of murder, and hadn’t moved at all to halt his actions. “I just don’t know why you’d choose here of all places to strike. I don’t- I don’t… care about the others, but shouldn’t you want to at least protect Jondy?”

Later, Max would realize how she’d said the exact wrong thing. He’d hurt _her_ in the past to further his own goals, after all—what, with the giant blades of glass and all--so why should she think that his niece would be any different?

Apparently, she wasn’t.

Ben started laughing uproariously at Max’s words, and he even starting weaving all over his surroundings—trying to throw her off, as she tried to follow his movements—and eventually he got away from her.

He was much further from the pop dispenser now, and was directly behind the kitchen, but right in front of the door, veering off to the east, that led towards an exit.

And only now did Max understand that it had never been steel that Ben had been holding at all, but rather a bomb.

Max’s breath hitched in her throat, and she reached for it helplessly—the way that a baby might reach for a binky—but she knew she’d be too late.

“You really think this has anything to do with Jondy, Max? No no no no no. It has to do with _you_. You weren’t- you weren’t supposed to be like you are now, and doing what I’m about to will set everything right; it will-”

He moved to detonate the bomb.

“Ben!” Max called out, doing so so loudly that she hoped the faculty would realize something was amiss, pull the fire alarm where she had failed to, and evacuate _some_ of the people before it was too late. It was a vain hope that Max had, but at least it was still a hope.

But in the end… it wasn’t that that ended up helping to save the day. It was Logan Cale, of all people.

What he was doing at this school, and why he was heading her way, Max had no idea, but it served to instantly sober Ben up.

“Logan…” Max started, as the aforementioned person continued to make his way to her, proving that even though he knew about Ben, he must not have known what he looked like at all. “Get out of here while you can. Ben has- He’s going to-”

That certainly got Logan’s attention, and he almost seemed to drop the curious envelope he was holding in his hands as consequence of it.

“Well, Logan Cale: just how have you become acquainted with my dear sister? And why are you looking at her like that?”

Max saw a strength in Logan then, that she’d never known existed, when he almost didn’t seem to react to Ben’s puzzling words at all.

Instead, the man with the five ‘o clock shadow slowly turned in Ben’s direction and asked simply, “What are you talking about?”

Ben grinned maliciously.

And possessed by what very well could have been Divine Intervention, Max grabbed onto Logan’s hand, headed back towards the left as fast as their legs could take them, and went out the one door, just as everything exploded all around them—the heat of the blast giving Max the kind of third degree burn she hadn’t had since her feet had gotten burnt by exposure in Florida, when she’d been without sunblock.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

…

The next thing Max was aware of was more pain than she’d ever felt in her life, and flashes of white. The white part wasn’t as… nice as TV shows seemed to put it.

Instead, everything seemed to spin about in her head—dizzying her, as her mind would sometimes turn back to what was truly happening in reality again, only for it to shimmer away and leave her to fantasies once more, confusing her all the while—and her hearing was gone for the moment

Max was almost certain that she heard someone calling her name. Someone wearing braids, it looked like, but she couldn’t be sure of it at all, because the next thing she knew for sure was that she was dreaming.

…

_She was back with Tinga, right before Tinga ended up leaving the house at fifteen and right before the insanity with Ben had started._

_Max was currently playing with a doll that looked a lot like her sister, and she was even trying to put said doll into a red outfit, that her favorite character in a book series often wore._

_Tinga looked a lot like Xari Oth’ilin from that saga, actually._

_“Max, honey,” Tinga had interrupted her then, none too kindly, “don’t you think it’s weird for someone your age to still play with dolls?”_

_As it turned out, the reason Tinga had been talking in such a way at the time was because she had become the most mature of the siblings then—perhaps she was even pregnant with Jondy at that point; Max wasn’t sure—and didn’t want to be alone anymore, so she wanted the others to grow up and help in that._

_Max remembered looking up, feeling betrayed, at Tinga in that moment. It might have been true that even she herself had once felt that way, but upon talking to one of her classmates, Seth—who had still played with action figures—Max thought that it was pretty common for the both of them to still be enjoying children’s things._

_And despite what it had started at as, the time where Max had been playing with “Xari” ended up being a good memory for her and Tinga both, when Max admitted that she was pretending that the doll she was playing with was_ Tinga _, but Tinga cosplaying—something that the half-Asian girl had felt honored for—._

_Tinga had never heard of the “Restoration” books before, and so she had become quite curious when Max had spoken of them._

_Upon reading them herself after that, Max thought that Tinga must have noted some of the similarities that she had to the Westerlorn woman had, and so didn’t scold Max for playing with her dolls anymore ever again._

_Instead, she even seemed kind of curious about what kind of “sequels” to “Awakenings” that Max could somewhat come up with during her play times._

_And when Tinga had finally gotten to the part with the villain in the book, Josephus, Max had figured out right away that she’d somewhat named Jondy after that man when she’d been born._

_Something… something that worried Max greatly: the fact that Jondy had been named after someone evil, when her uncle was already that himself, that was._

_It was even worse now, too, that Tinga seemed to be trying to make her son like Ben…_

But why was she remembering all of this now, Max wondered? The moment she woke up, she instantly tried to sit up and survey just what was happening around her, but that ended up being impossible—a piece of shrapnel going through her arm, it seemed, and the paramedics were trying to get her into an ambulance, amongst the chaos going on all around them.

Max ended up calling “Jondy!” very loudly then, and many times, as she finally recalled just what kind of nightmare she now found herself in, but she had no idea if the girl could hear her not… provided that she was even still alive.

Judging by all the worried parents trying to find their kids amongst the rubble, Max was thinking that that answer wasn’t looking so good.

She leaned over the gurney she was strapped on, and hurled into the grass beside her, just at the idea of Jondy—and all of the other junior high students who’d been in the building—being murdered cruelly by her brother.

And it was only as she did so that Max was finally able to focus on the person who had been beside her at the crime scene all along.

“Original Cindy,” Max gasped, trying to get a hold on the girl’s hand for comfort, but instead groggily grabbing her mouth instead. “What- what happened? There was- there was a man with me. Is _he_ alright? What about Jondy?”

Cindy didn’t answer Max’s question right away. Instead, she seemed to be contemplating about something else, though it was a something that Max couldn’t understand! Why would she choose to ignore her in a crisis such as this, damn it?!

To the right of her, Max saw that the majority of the kitchen from the school had been torn asunder, except for the moldy stove that had somehow managed to survive.

More than a few kids were walking around with some ugly injuries, looking to help people out instead of go to their parents instantly, and Max was touched by how good they were during a crisis; better than herself, certainly.

And the absolute worst thing that Max was seeing now? That the pop machine she’d thought of earlier _had_ seemed to explode, and it looked like a lot of the soda cans had careened out of it and hit a lot of teens on the head, hurting many and even killing a few.

Max bit her lip so hard, then, that it bled, as she tried desperately to keep from crying out.

“You seem… different, Max,” Original Cindy finally spoke up, as she herself finally gave Max her hand, as Max was momentarily too disoriented to grab it on her own, and allowed her to squeeze it gently. “Almost more… caring, I’d say.”

Max didn’t know how to respond to that. Instead, Max got the sudden notion that—if Original Cindy was somehow right—this change of character in her had been what Ben was looking for all along, which meant that all those people had suffered for he-

“Wait! Cynthia!” Max cried out to her friend, just before an oxygen mask was put onto her. “Have you seen my brother, Ben? Originally, he was in the library for some reason, and I think there’s a connection there. The librarian might even be in trouble… I-”

The Puerto Rican girl didn’t get to finish the thought, and she doubted that Original Cindy had heard her at all.

Max was being raised into the back of the truck now, just as Zack came onto the scene, seeming to be holding papers and running towards her, much the same as Logan had been earlier.

**Author’s Note: Talk of “Awakenings” is somewhat me being selfish some (LOL), because the character in that book, Xari, DOES remind me a lot of Tinga. In fact, I always told myself that if I were to make a fan movie trailer for that book, I’d use Tinga from DA to fill in the role of Xari, so I kind of had to connect the two here. LOL.**

**But I highly recommend you guys read “Restoration Book 1: Awakenings” by Laura Josephsen and Faith King. It’s an absolute original and fantastic read, and I don’t think anyone would regret it, honestly:D**

**I’m also having Max being a massive reader in this, because I want her to be BA and smart here—though she’s obviously not a genetically engineered X-5 in this, so she doesn’t have all of her traits from the show—and she and Logan always loved having smart banter, anyway. LOL.**

**Anyway, thanks for reading! Hope you guys are enjoying! If you have any questions, feel free to ask! And don’t be scared of reviewing, either. I swear that I don’t bite=)**

**Edit: And for those who don’t know, “Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree” is a children’s book about how Mr. Willowby bought a Christmas tree, but it was too tall for his ceiling, so he cut the top part off of it and threw it away, but animals stole it and ended up using that for their own tree—but it was too big for them, too, so they also cut some off—and mice get a piece for their own tree after that, and so on and so forth.**

**"Tears of a Tiger" is about a teenage football player who commits suicide, and how all of his loved ones deal with that, and as for "Awakenings"?**

**Well, I’ll explain the Xari part to you guys. She’s half-Asian (it’s called Westerlorn in the book, and they’re kind of hated upon for being “wild”), and she’s a chosen “speaker” (one of twelve who are chosen to represent and speak for a certain animal, otter in Xari’s case, and have a special power for doing that. Xari, for instance, can read and somewhat influence emotions). She also wears braids, dresses in red a lot, has an eyebrow piercing, I think, and is an all-around two-sword-wielding, acrobatic badass. LOL.**

**Oh, and if you guys haven’t noticed, I’m including a lot of X-5s from the three Dark Angel books here:3**


	5. Chapter 5

Max awoke with a shuddering breath.

She’d known, as she’d been dreaming, that she’d wake up in a hospital, and that was exactly what had happened.

Surveying the place around her, she saw that she was hooked up to an IV—no surprise there—and there was gauze wrapped tightly around her that was making it hard to breathe.

She must have gotten more damaged from the explosion than she’d thought… But what should one expect, when napalm—made from crumbled cat litter dissolved in gasoline, wrapped tight in sandbags—had been at the scene?

Closing her eyes, as she remembered reading about all that in “Fight Club”, Max found herself wondering how the entire school building hadn’t gone up, the way that a skyscraper did in that book, with explosions going off in slow motion in the main character’s mind and materials falling out from windows, as surely as fire licked everything up in its sight.

Though maybe she was just remembering wrong. Maybe the entire building _was_ gone, and she was the only one left at all.

Maybe Jondy…

But it was too painful to think about. So Max chose to stop thinking much of _anything_ , and willed herself back to the realm of sleep, where it was safe.

She felt badly for ignoring Cindy—who was patiently waiting for her to wake up in an uncomfortable looking chair in the corner of the room—but having just been a near victim in a terrorist attack her motherfucker of a brother had been responsible for, Max thought that she was perfectly entitled to doze off.

…

When Max finally came to—and willed herself to stay awake this time, because she couldn’t put off the Jondy, Logan Cale, or Ben question off any longer… plus, she was hungry—it wasn’t Original Cindy’s face she ended up seeing, or even Kendra’s, but rather Zack’s.

Max tried to pull away from him, but then quickly regretted it when something began stabbing her as a consequence.

Oh, right… the IV, and her moving away from the machine probably wasn’t helping a thing at all, was it?

But Max swore that if this puppy of a man was going to use this event as an excuse to try and win her heart back, she was going to kill him.

…Though maybe he was being too harsh? Max debated, as she tiredly chanced a look his way.

Zack was holding some tattered papers in his hand—that it looked like he must have been combing over a lot—and wearing glasses and looked bone tired.

“Max… Hi,” he whispered pleasantly enough—when he noticed her staring at him—making said woman breathe a sigh of relief:

For the vain reasons, of course, that he wasn’t yet trying to get into her good graces again, or making her file her taxes, or whatever those things were…

But most importantly, that maybe it meant he didn’t have bad news to tell her, after all…

And proving that—even though things hadn’t worked out between them, that he was still a good and attentive man—the moment Zack had heard a sound of displeasure coming from Max, he asked the million-dollar question. “Oh, are you hurting? Do you want me to get a nurse in here, to administer your medicine?”

…Right. She was drugged. Of course she would be, after surviving what she had.

And it certainly explained why she was focusing on stupid things at the moment—like taxes—and not the direst things of all.

But finally knowing there was no running away anymore, Max made an offer to concentrate and ask what she needed to now.

Surprisingly enough, what she ended up uttering, though, was something she hadn’t even been considering at all.

“Zack, am I… Am I going to die? Just tell me that first, please. Am I- am I really bad? _Was_ I really bad? My family’s- my family’s been alerted and has my will, right? Everything should mostly go to Ting-”

It was clear by the way Zack’s eyebrows shot into his hairline that he was surprised that Max had chosen to talk about her perhaps impending death so surely.

She was too, to be honest.

Later, when she went home with the express orders to heal and not worry about much, she would ponder that maybe she’d been having a case of survivor’s guilt, but she couldn’t say for sure.

“Uhh… Yeah, Max. All that stuff’s been taken care of. You know hospitals, I mean: Always have to get that stuff out of the way when one comes in. But you’re- you’re fine. You’re going to be just fine.”

And Max could see the sincerity in Zack’s eyes’ and as much as she’d been banking on death before, she found she was suddenly glad for this promise.

She wasn’t ready to meet the afterlife so soon, thank you very much. As far as she was concerned, if any deity did exist, they were probably cruel for creating someone like Ben, and leading to this- leading to this massacre.

“Where is everyone?” Max asked then. Not trying to be rude, but she was honestly curious.

Also, she found that she suddenly felt ravenous. Grabbing a carton of orange Jell-O from off her bedside tray (though “fin” seemed to be a better word for it to Max, as that was what it more closely resembled), she began wolfing the desert down—relishing what might end up being the last meal she could eat without feeling any guilt, possibly.

“They went to get something to eat,” Zack admitted. And though Max supposed she should have just assumed they had to go the cafeteria while it was open, she got the feeling that there must not have been much wrong with her, if her whole family had felt well enough to leave her alone for the time being.

That left only one question, then. “Zack… How is everyone? Is Jondy- is she… What about a ‘Logan Cale’? He was with me when the bomb went off, and-”

 _And if he dies, it’ll be my fault_ , Max thought, as she leaned back into her pillow and tried not to imagine the man dead and lifeless.

She had no reason to blame herself entirely—as she really had no idea why he’d been at the school to begin with, but it seemed that it had probably had something to do with Ben—if he did pass away, it would’ve Ben’s fault entirely and not hers, but…

That was really hard for Max to reconcile in her mind right now. Logan had been holding a paper when she’d seen him—almost happily, it had seemed—and what if that was all for nothing now?

She sighed, feeling dizzy now, and ironically prayed for the best.

Zack blinked, no doubt confused about the questions about Logan Cale, as he would have no idea who that was.

When Max had first thought she’d been having problems with the man, she hadn’t exactly known his name to tell Zack, had she?

And then afterwards—when Max had learned more about him, and that he really wasn’t a problem at all—she hadn’t seen or spoken to Zack at all.

Trying to explain her question—as Max looked out the window and saw the light blue, almost white, sky that birds danced through via their flightpath—she said, “He’s someone… I’ve become friends with lately.”

“Friends” seemed like a strong word to use at the moment to Max, but any other one and Zack might have misconstrued it to mean that she and Logan were dating, and “acquaintance” just seemed like too little a term for what they’d just been through together.

“He was in the school building, too, Zack, and-”

  _I wonder if he saw the same thing that I did_ , Max thought then, realizing.

She’d thought she’d seen some sort of glint in Ben’s hand before the explosion had rocketed through her, but that didn’t at all make sense with the kind of bomb that she knew he had used (the only one, that as far as she knew, he had known how to make), so was Logan right, then? Was she seeing things from parallel universes somehow, or was she just crazy?

And so there was a part of Max that wanted to go talk to Logan even moreso now—provided that he was alright, that was—but then she realized that Zack hadn’t answered the most important question of all, just as Kendra and Cynthia both filed into the room with ice cream in their hands.

“Jondy, Zack. Is she-”

The woman who had suffered far too much in her short life was holding onto Zack’s arm now, something she hadn’t done since they’d been dating, but she didn’t care.

This meant everything to her, and she’d have Zack feel the tension in her hand, damnit, and she’d make sure he was looking her in the eye!

“Jondy’s fine, Max,” Kendra answered for her, smiling kindly her way, though Max could tell that there were tear tracks on her face and that quickly dulled the grin’s effect.

“She’s here, actually, and she’s being well taken care of. She wants- she wants to see you. And she says… she says she doesn’t want you to feel guilty, either.”

Kendra was beside Max now, smoothing some of her mussed hair out of her face, and so Max tried not to react too strongly (lest Kendra pick up on just who the bomber had been), when she said, “Guilty- guilty about what? What’s she talking about?”

Thankfully, Original Cindy was the one to answer then. It wasn’t so much that Max absolutely hated Zack and Kendra’s bedside manner towards her—she even somewhat appreciated it, if she was being honest; it was nice to feel cared for—but sometimes she just needed the bandage to be ripped fresh off, as it were.

Max’s best friend understood that, where the others didn’t.

“The librarian ya went to see… She didn’t make it, beau. I’m sorry. But the principal at the school—who’s ‘live and well—knows you’d gone for an interview to be the _new_ librarian that day, and- In response to everythin’ that’s happened, he’s decided to go ahead and give ya the job. Jondy, bless the girl, doesn’t wan’chu to blame yoself fo’ tha’, though.”

“Oh.”

It was clear from the looks on everyone’s faces that this was not the response from Max that they’d been hoping for. Why that was, Max didn’t know. Did they think her simple, one-worded answer was a hint that she was despairing?

In reality, Max was excited for the job (at the time she had been, anyway; later, her mind would stop trying to protect itself and she’d feel all the pain for the Jace woman she hadn’t allowed herself to before), but she was worried that Ben would find her there again, and try to recruit her.

And so… wouldn’t she just be putting the surviving teachers and students in more danger, while being around them in whatever building they’d temporarily transfer to?

Suddenly, Max found that she didn’t want to be employed at F.D.R. Middle School in the slightest, but how to let that be known without putting suspicion onto herself?

They all knew that needed to pay the bills, after all, and she’d just lost her job with Normal…

“Max, you seem tired…” Kendra said then. And in Max’s fuzzy, drug-addled mind that was starting to see rainbows, she thought it made sense that Kendra would notice this. She had some… excess weight, didn’t she? And they said _that_ that could make people tired.

“Why don’t we let you rest, and we can show you all the flowers Zane sent you in a little bi-”

Kendra’s words were effectively cut off when there was a knock on the door.

As the person rapped on the wooden frame gently, Max heard a new and familiar voice. “I’m sorry to bother you all, but is Max here? Is she doing well?”

Well, color Maxine surprised, as she tried to sit up gracefully and face the speaker. Logan had come to see _her_ (though he seemed to be walking with some sort of device connected to him, which made it hard to get into the room with so many people standing about, and so he just seemed to be hovering outside the door for that reason).

“Logan!” Max exclaimed, as she craned her head to look at where he was standing just in front of the nurse’s section. “You’-re you’re alright. I’m glad to see that.”

And Max was surprised to find just how glad she truly was.

She had thought that Bling had been the person to endearingly leaven an impression on her, but now she found herself thinking that… that if their roles had been reversed (if Bling had been inside the skyscraper instead of Logan, that was), that she still would’ve been happier to see Logan in this instance that Bling.

Which was a terrible thing to think! And Max was confused about why she’d even entertain the idea.

As far as she could tell, there were only four options for it (and she felt ashamed, and wanted to somewhat hide, for each of them):

The most likely option being that she was entirely loopy from the drugs at this point, so her thoughts just _couldn’t_ make sense…

That her brain was still in some adrenaline type state, and was telling her things it otherwise couldn’t.

Or she just wanted even more now to take her bastard of a brother out, and she knew that Logan would be the only way to do that.

Of course, the idea that she was just insane was another contender to Max.

As Max looked at Logan’s face, and really tried to take it all in—the type of reality and truth she thought she was there, that even seemed to have some slight humor beneath it—she found herself deciding it had to be the second option.

She’d- she’d just now finally figured out what he’d been carrying in the school when she’d seen him—just why he’d gone there at all—which was something that adrenaline could have allowed her to see at that time, and she almost began crying for it.

“Logan… You were there to get your middle school transcript, to apply for some sort of job? I’m so- I’m sorry.”

And Max knew—knew it in every fiber of her being—that saying such a thing here, in front of all of her friends, wasn’t a good idea.

But yet she couldn’t help herself.

And Logan… He looked at her with a long stare, seeming to somehow know that she needed to ride out the emotions she was feeling now—be they right or wrong—because she suppressed her emotions far too much.

But finally, he closed his eyes—inclined his head slightly—and smiled at her. “Max, it’s perfectly fine. It wasn’t- _None_ of it’s your fault. I just wanted to see that you were doing okay, because… Unfortunately, what we just went through was definitely something to write home about. And not exactly in a good way.”

Max laughed, and then locked eyes with him—trying to let Logan know just through their locked gaze how much his checking in meant to her.

She was about to say as much through words, even (or so she told herself), but Logan must have realized that Cindy was waiting for an introduction and that Zack and Kendra seemed uncomfortable around him, because he said suddenly:

“I, uh… I don’t want to keep you from your family, Max. I’ll talk to you later, if you want. It was nice meeting you all,” he finished, as he began moving back towards his room, his own IV machine—it looked like—trailed behind him.

Max was somewhat sad to see Logan go… and she’d been wondering if seeing him would make her feel more reluctant to face Ben, or more ready to.

It looked like the latter was true, and so Max could only hope that her family and friends hadn’t just scared him off, because of their… tense history together, all because of her.

But those thoughts swiftly left Max’s mind, as she saw Tinga and her brother-in-law filing into the room. And suddenly all she could think about was dolls, and how happy she was to have been able to bond with Tinga over them in the past.

Zack gracefully finally gave up his position closest to Max—so that she could receive a hug from Tinga, which she was grateful for—and Charlie Smith ended up leaning in to give her a lollipop.

If she was being honest with herself, Max was kind of surprised by that, and she was sure that it showed; she assumed that Charlie was just trying to be nice, and make her feel better, since they didn’t know each other well enough for him to do so in another way.

Deciding not to take it, however, and nearly curling her hand back into a fist (even though Max thought that she’d very much have liked the cotton candy lollli, thank you very much), she came up with a better alternative:

Max would have to play it on her meds, if she had to, but Tinga would have no choice but to listen to her now.

“Keep your lollipops for what I’m about to tell you guys… Or more to make up for it, I guess. Tinga… please don’t make the child you’re currently carrying like Ben. I feel like… I feel like that would disrespect Ben’s memory, so please just don’t do it.”

Tinga gasped loudly at Max’s request, and she could tell—as she tried her hardest to keep a straight face and not let her fear show—that Charlie seemed slightly offended for Tinga’s sake, but Max honestly couldn’t have cared less. This was for the best.

And having just been in a bomb zone _because_ of Ben, damnit (not that they knew that, though), she thought she was more than a little entitled to make these kinds of requests.

Original Cindy definitely seemed to think so. She’d been pushed into the back of the room when Max’s siblings had come in, but she seemed about to jump in for her sake at the moment.

Max loved Cynthia so much… Even if she did also somewhat like that Kendra seemed about to step-in, should things go too far.

“I think tha’s more than something yous could manage, Tinga, what with Max having a mad gash on her forehead ‘n all.”

“Of course, Max,” Tinga finally gave in (to which Kendra let out a sigh of relief). “Oh, anything, honey. How are you- how are you feeling?”

Almost as if answering her own question, Tinga moved the bandage on Max’s forehead up slightly, for it must have slid askew.

“I heard,” she continued on, before Max could really think, or get a word in. “I heard that you went into the school knowing about the bomber and trying to save Jondy. Thank you, Max. Thank you _so_ much. And I’m so sorry!”

Max bit her lip, deeply contemplating now.

And in the background, she could tell that Zack was doing the same thing.

Not for the first time, Max wondered just how much he knew about her.

And there truthfully was a part of the Guevara girl, who really wanted to tell her sister the truth about their brother Ben, finally.

But she could also tell just from Tinga’s previous statement just how fragile she was, and so Max thought it would be cruel to bring her into all of this, if she could handle it even less so than she herself was able to.

Maybe Zack even felt the same way, and might end up becoming one of her allies through all of this, Max hoped.

…There was also something else to be thinking about when it came to Tinga’s sentence: something that was far more consequential.

Where the _hell_ had Tinga gotten the idea that she’d gone to the school knowing what was to come?!

It wasn’t at all true, and though Max had heard about false information spreading during times of crisis before, but she was also deeply worried about something so widely being off the margin.

“Tinga, what are you-”

Before Max could actually question it, a nurse walked into the room with a clipboard in hand. She was Asian, and Max thought that she was very pretty, even if her eyes, nose, and lips were pretty small looking.

The woman had long and black curly hair; she was also sporting the cerulean blue of the hospital’s that Logan himself had been wearing in his own hospital gown, and what Max assumed she herself was wearing.

Coming into the room, the woman said cheerily enough, “Hi, Max! I came in here to talk about the number of endorphins we’re seeing in your blood right now, presumably from trying to stop the bomber, you hero, you.”

Oh. So _that_ was where people had gotten that wrong impression. What a strange connection to make!

But then again? Maybe, for whatever reason, she was having such an irregular number of endorphins in her, that people could only assume they would result in an act of heroism? Max thought.

“That’s- that’s well and good,” Max said, eyeing the nurse warily, because she almost seemed higher than Max herself felt. “But could you… Could you help me out? The gash in my head and abdomen’s really starting to hurt me now.”

And in response to that, all of Max’s loved ones gave her horrified looks, and began trying to walk closer to her, as if thinking the nurse could hand some of the pills to them, or something, so they could get them to Max even faster.

Smiling, the nurse said, “Of course, Max. I’m sorry. You most definitely deserve that, honey. I’ll get right on that, but- I need to talk to you about what’s going on with you, and how that’s important and ties into everything else. I’m Brin, by the way.”

And as she began putting new medication on Max’s wounds, and new bandages on her after the fact—long before she gave her pills to ingest, but Max didn’t care, because she was already feeling a lot better from just these few things—there was no denying that this woman _was_ a nurse and knew what she was doing, but…

Yet… Max couldn’t shake the feeling that this woman also knew what was going on with her and Ben—and their connection to each other—and just why Ben had wanted her by his side at all.


	6. Chapter 6

Max’s conversation with Brin didn’t exactly give her a lot of the information that she’d been hoping for.

Instead, she seemed to talk mostly in gobbledygook—and Max thought that last word completely literally, as she was pretty sure she was making up everything she was saying, because she didn’t want to say anything in front of Max’s ever present family—but with each word Brin spoke, Max could swear she heard the truth under it:

“I know about you. I know about your brother. And he wants you… You to be happy, but to be so for something sinister.”

Either that, or the drugs really were playing with her mind.

And partially for that question and her confusion, Max decided she wasn’t going to be all gung-ho about finding Ben when she got home, as she’d initially thought she would.

She needed to rest, anyway. Brin—who she did end up getting the number of—certainly enforced that she should be doing just that. And her family was definitely making sure that she slept every chance that she could get.

Max also needed to get used to being a somewhat celebrity now, and having so many things reporting on the incident, she thought reluctantly.

Everyone was claiming that she was a hero. That she had somehow known what was going to happen, and had lessened the effects of the even bigger catastrophe it could’ve been.

That was utter bull to Max, but she did accept—happily—that she at the very least had probably saved Logan Cale’s life.

When Max did get out of the hospital—Jondy fussing around her constantly, and trying her best to help her, when really she just caused water from the kitchen sink to flood out onto the floor and things like that… not that Max didn’t still appreciate her trying—she had to endure a lot of people calling her to be on talk shows and the like.

At first she hadn’t known how to handle it—or that they’d be calling at all—so when she’d accidentally picked the phone up on such people, she’d stammered out some really awkward sentences that were later played on radio stations crediting her.

But all too soon she wised up and stopped answering her landline all together, as Max assumed that the people she loved would know to call her cell, and so she avoided much hassle that way.

She ended up appreciating “Wheel of Fortune” more, too, as she recuperated. Mainly because Syl—Zack’s girlfriend—would come over and turn it on, while they were cleaning things for her if Jondy was in the room: that way they weren’t watching anything untoward with the kid around.

Though at first Max had hated it, she did end up winning ten-thousand dollars for watching a certain episode.

She’d been clever, and had had Tinga put the membership in her name, so that if she won (and Max hadn’t thought that she would), the game show wouldn’t go on and on about the heroine “Max”, as they’d hopefully have no idea Tinga was related to her at all.

So when she miraculously _did_ end up getting the cash—the cash that she was pretty sure the universe was giving her for saving Logan’s life, and as a payback for how terribly fate had treated her so far—she couldn’t have been happier with her foresight.

Life was… surprisingly good right now. Ten-thousand dollars didn’t go a long way, that was for sure, but at least Max had something to help pay the bills and for food, when she was too sick to work.

…And keeping the TV on the gameshow all the time kept her from seeing reports on what was now happening: like how everyone was throwing all their power into finding a “terrorist” from that day that they never would, because if Logan was right… Ben was probably existing in another time and place altogether. For now, at least.

Speaking of Logan, Max did end up calling him twice. The first time was to see how he was doing, as he’d been kind enough to drop in on her when she’d been at the hospital.

The second time was when she finally found the guts to tell him what she remembered before the bomb went off:

That at the time of it, she’d thought she’d seen something glinting silver fine in his hand, but that hadn’t ended up being the case at all.

Fortunately, Logan didn’t seem to think that Max was crazy for telling him this story at all. Nor did he seem to think that her eyes had been playing tricks on her.

Instead, he’d ended up telling her what she’d already kind of guessed:

“I think you were seeing another event. A similar event to one that happened here, but one that turned out entirely different. I think… I think your eye for seeing the anomalies is starting to strengthen. Probably because you’re Ben’s sister.”

There was something in Logan’s words, then, that Max thought he wasn’t telling her. He seemed to be annunciating something in a certain way—to make a point and be honest with himself—all the while that he kept something from her.

Trying to guess at what this might be, Max had asked, “Logan, you seem to know a lot about this, for someone who claims to only have ‘blurry sight’. You see the anomalies just as well as I do, don’t you?”

And Logan hadn’t answered back right away—so while Max twisted the telephone cord between her fingers, and shifted her weight from one foot to the other impatiently—she had assumed that was his answer right there.

Eventually, he even ended up admitting something she never would’ve guessed at: “You wanted to know why Bling was looking after me, if I have no need for a physical therapist, right?

“Well, the truth to that, Max, it’s because I used to be in a wheelchair. I used to be way worse than that, actually. Very sickly. But then I started seeing things, and as I did so, I got better and better. I don’t know how… but whatever your brother’s doing is actually benefiting me.”

And Max, like the coward she was, had hung up on him then, unable to comprehend just how selfless Logan Cale was.

Ben’s actions, in a roundabout way, were making the man better. And yet…

And yet Logan wanted to stop Ben for the greater good.

But back in the present, Max was trying her best not to think of Ben or Logan at all.

She knew that it wouldn’t last, that eventually Ben would come and find her again, but for the time being… she was so much happier pretending.

“Syl,” Max told the blonde beauty who was currently sitting on the couch beside her—glaring at a bug on one of Kendra’s russet colored vases, as if she thought that that alone would make it scamper back to wherever it had come from.

Maybe she was right. Maybe it would.

“I know you really don’t ride motorcycles, but you should so go to Crash and pretend like you do. With that strong glare of yours, I bet a lot of people would pay to sponsor you… Until they realize how bad you are at even balancing on a bike, and how wrong they were to give you money.”

Syl laughed uproariously at that, as she threw her head back—her blonde hair falling around her head like a waterfall as she did so—and Max was glad that at least someone around her had been able to feel true mirth lately.

Jondy, too, came in to see what had caught their fancy. And when she saw just how happy Syl was, she grabbed onto her hands—perhaps thinking she’d had a manicure, and that had made her so ecstatic?—but upon realizing that she hadn’t done anything girly and fun lately, to make her feel this way, she began braiding Syl’s hair to make her feel good in a less crazy way, maybe.

Honestly, Max had never been much of a girly-girl, but she did get some enjoyment out of seeing Jondy weaving Zack’s girl’s hair so expertly.

Max hated braids in her own hair, as they always seemed to give her a headache, but on someone else… it looked marvelous.

“What are you doing to my daughter, Maxine?” Tinga said then, in finally seeming to realize that a bad example was maybe being set for Jondy:

A bad example about conning people.

But man, did Tinga have a delayed reaction, or what?!

 So when Tinga came into the room to swoop Jondy into the air, and then place her into a chair where there was a book about weaving there, Max could only shrug her shoulders helplessly, as if to say she had no idea what her sister was talking about.

Tinga shook her head in amusement. “Only you, Max. What? Are you hoping to teach her to be like ‘Anathriel’, who used her wits and grace to outmaneuver her captor-”

A knock on the door quickly silenced Tinga’s question.

Curiously, Max got to her feet—doing her best to take it easy—and she could only pray that the paparazzi hadn’t finally found her.

Thankfully, that didn’t end up being the case.

Instead, it was Logan standing before her. And though Max was glad to see him, there was a part of her that felt reluctant about the whole thing… if he was just going to be here to talk about her brother, that way.

Max didn’t think that was likely to happen, though: he seemed to be holding a chessboard under his arm, so maybe he’d come over to play a board game with her?

The young woman let him in wordlessly—not really knowing what to say—but smiling at her family all the same, to let them know it was okay.

“Umm… Hi,” Logan said, waving awkwardly “I’m a… friend of Max’s.” And Max could tell that he had somewhat hesitated on the word “friend”, as if wondering if they were close enough to call each other that yet.

But when Max didn’t end up objecting, he continued on with his story.

“We were at the school together, when it… when it happened. The doctor said that today’s the first day I can really leave my house, and I was wondering if you guys would maybe like to play a game together? The friend I have at my house has been very boring, only checking on my health and not allowing me much entertainment, so I had to finally give up on him.”

Max chuckled, and headed towards the kitchen to get a chair from there to put into the dining room.

“Sounds great, Logan. But we are so not playing chess. That takes too much thinking for me right now, so I’m afraid it’s checkers or bust.”

And when Logan didn’t object to that in the slightest, Max knew knew that she had _her_ answer.

…

Somewhere along the line, Jondy stopped playing the game with them. And though Max missed having the kiddo next to her, she could understand why she was instead choosing to watch “Attack on Titan” now: apparently they had a massive checkerboard mat at her school, so she was kind of forced to play checkers all the time.

So that left only the adults (minus Syl, who had had to leave earlier to go talk to Zack, for whatever reason).

Max had kindly chosen to let Tinga be on Logan’s team, since she herself was very good at tactics and would have wiped the floor with them, otherwise.

There, sitting at a table full of artsy knick-knacks that Max and Kendra had both gathered up—and with dragon’s blood incense going off in the background, that allowed Max to relax just ever so slightly—she ended up asking something of Tinga that she’d always wanted to:

“Do you think… Do you think it’s because of our dad that we ended up the way that we did?”

Max Guevara was careful not to mention the truth about Ben, of course, but if she could maybe get some sort of answer from Tinga without alerting her to much—and who knows? Maybe it would be so helpful, that Max would decide to go on a quest through her dad’s old things to look for some more answers—she’d take it.

“Well, Lydecker wasn’t exactly the warmest man, no. He also wasn’t always there for us.

“In fact, Max, there are times I think he resented me—and that some of his coldness was because of Mom and me—because he thought that Aki just used him to get a Green Card, and then left him, but…

“I think he instilled good things into us more than anything else: My desire to be as good a mom as possible for Jondy, and now even for Case. Your determination and selfless kindness… The fact that Ben worked himself to the bone…”

Max had to hold back the incredulous laugh she wanted to let loose at the idea of anything about Ben being “good”, even if Tinga had been forced to believe that Ben’s “work ethic” had led him to an early grave.

But then Max had to wonder why Tinga had put his death on this list at all, without a quantifier there. Did she actually think that Ben’s “death” had been a good thing?

Max was about to ask that, but Logan ended up unintentionally interrupting her.

“Okay, Max: Next round, I demand that Tinga and I get the black tiles. I think the reason we’re losing is because I’m trying to pretend to be something that I’m not here, by being red. But I need the black pieces, because they’re black like my soul.”

At that, Max couldn’t help but to grin, and to ruffle Logan’s hair some slightly. It was good to know that even someone hell-bent on saving the world apparently had a dark side.

A dark side, unlike Ben’s, that she could actually handle.

Tinga also seemed amused by Logan’s comment. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’ll help you much if you’re on my team, Logan. Because I _am_ being true to myself by using red.

“BUT I really need to get going with Jondy now, so try your best to bamboozle Max into letting you use black, so that you can win that way.”

The adults, plus Jondy, bid their goodbyes to each other (Max promising to go see Jondy’s friend, Vada, who Jondy had been ecstatic to learn had survived Ben’s play for power), and then it was just the two seers alone together.

“So why did you really come over here?” Max questioned at last, starting to clean up some of the water that was still spilled beneath her sink because of Jondy.

Not that Max really blamed the little girl for it. It was actually kind of fun to be sliding on the floor right now!

“Actually, I came hoping to make you feel better. We do have things you can talk about, if you wish, but I’m tired of seeing you suffer, Max.”

Well, that made the girl feel a whole lot better. She smiled secretly to herself.

Going back to the table where Logan still sat, Max squeezed his hand some, before saying (while looking purposefully away from him), “Well, it worked. Tinga helped me realize that this… This isn’t a family thing. It isn’t Lydecker’s fault, even though I could blame him in some ways, so hopefully my family’s not just cursed.”

Max had wanted to say “Hopefully I won’t turn out like Ben”, but she held back on it—not wanting Logan to promise her that, just to be nice, that he didn’t think she could ever be.

“So I have an idea of where Ben might strike next,” Logan said suddenly, perhaps sensing the resolve that Max had in that moment to bring her brother down. “His endgame, if you will.”

 _I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to hear this_ , Max thought internally, already dreaming of when she could next take a shower and cry: it was the only place in the world where she could truly be honest with herself.

“Yeah… You see. Most people say that the world is million years old. Christians only say six-thousand. And I’m not,” Logan said, as he held his hands up to her, as she’d been just about to counter him. “I’m not trying to start a theological debate here.

“But you know how the moon and tides effect each other? Well, as they do so, the moon gets pulled closer and closer to Earth. And Christians think they’ve figured out that if the planet was millions of years old, like others think, the moon would have crashed into the Earth by now? But six-thousand years? According to them—and some scientists, I suppose—it would be exactly where it is now, about, so…”

“So you think Ben’s going to try and stretch the years out, make the moon come closer to the planet, and destroy us all that way? How would that even be _possible_ , Logan? And with that theory, it sounds like he’s trying to pull souls into Valhalla—or something—instead of just creating parallels between many worlds, that then allows him to travel between them.”

Logan smiled ruefully at Max, as if to indicate that he didn’t have all the answers either.

She quickly told him that it was fine, then, and that she’d be on the lookout for any weird “tide” activity.

And for whatever reason, he seemed to get a kick out of that.

Max rolled her eyes, just at the thought of him no doubt comparing “tides” to “tighty-whities” in his mind.

…

Later on that night, when Max found that she couldn’t sleep, she ended up walking outside toward a basketball court housed in her neighborhood.

She wasn’t entirely sure, but she thought that it was maybe for people with disabilities.

And so it was that Max found herself pondering if Logan had ever come to this space.

When she’d first met him—and had made her snap judgements of him—she never would’ve pictured it. It would’ve been too tacky and gang-oriented for the noble, with enough graffiti to shake a stick at.

But now she realized that if there ever were to be a wheelchair tournament here—for those who had once had disabilities, but had miraculously been healed of them—he’d probably be the won to win it all, even if he hadn’t been in his own chair for quite some time now.

Max was thinking about grabbing a basketball—that she saw someone had left behind—and shooting some hoops herself, when she saw him.

There was nothing too spectacular about the stranger in the darkness: he looked like he belonged here for one thing (what, with his baggy clothes, dirty hair, and abysmal looking attitude).

But what surprised Max the most, was that the brunet man seemed to be crying. And they weren’t the kind of tears that people let loose about the simplest things, but something that only existed when a real problem was occurring.

Reluctantly stepping closer to the man (and keeping the basketball she’d scooped up on hand, in case she needed to use it as a weapon), Max said quietly, as not to scare him, “Hey, is everything alright?”

She might as well have not even existed at all, for all the attention he was giving her.

Or _wasn’t_ giving Max, to put it more correctly.

To be honest, Max felt kind of put out for it. She knew she wasn’t the prettiest girl in the world (she really only had her thinness to write home about, that had come from only eating healthy things, to remain inconspicuous… or so she had thought at the time), but she’d been looked at in the past, she knew.

It was also the dead of night, and though Max didn’t want to be thought as such, wouldn’t the man realize she could be a hooker, preparing to steal all his wealth in the weak state that he was in, or something?

Apparently not. And she was just about to leave the man all to his lonesome, when he finally spoke.

“I can’t believe I’m being sued for earrings, of all things.”

Max shot her arms up into the air, wondering if she was really going to have to be this man’s guardian angel tonight.

But deciding she maybe deserved that (and so much worse), for not realizing what her brother had been up to right away and stopping it, Max found herself playing her part exceedingly well. “What are you talking about?”

Finally, the man turned his attention to the brunette. He looked so down in the dumps, that she felt the strong need to insultingly call him “Eeyore” for it, but Max kept that thought to herself, as he seemed to size her up.

“You don’t look like someone who’d put diamond earrings into their recently pierced ears—despite the warning that you’re only supposed to where the studs at first—so I guess I’ll tell you.”

 _You kind of just did_ , Max thought, but she said nothing, as she began bouncing the ball she’d been holding onto around her.

She’d always been good at basketball, and had thought of maybe doing something with that in the past… Until the world as she’d known it had come crashing down around her.

“You’re right there. I got my ears pierced once and regretted it. But I listened to the instructions then. I wore these dark green colored studs, that really didn’t look good with anything—I don’t know what I was thinking back then, in getting them—but whatever.”

At that, the man smiled for the first time since Max had seen him.

“Well, then you’re smarter than this rich bitch I helped out,” he said, as he inclined his head in her direction. “I’m Sketchy, by the way.”

“Max.” There was a part of her that wanted to reach out and shake the stranger’s hand, as propriety dictated that she do so, but she held back on the desire. Max had no idea if this person might secretly be a murder, too, after all.

She did continue on with the conversation, however, as she began thinking about letting go of the basketball entirely, as it seemed like she could trust this guy. “So what’s your predicament, then? How are you being sued?”

Sketchy chortled without humor, which Max couldn’t help feeling didn’t match him at all. He seemed like someone who should’ve been partying twenty-four-seven, not someone who was meant to be worrying like this.

“Because I pierced the girl’s ears, gave her the instruction manual, and told her what and what not to do.

“But she chose to not listen, so that she could wear the diamond earrings her boyfriend got her for her birthday, and wouldn’t you know that her ears got infected for that?! But is she taking the rap for any of that? Of course not! I am!”

Truthfully, Max’s heart did go out to the guy. This was why she didn’t like a majority of rich people—except for Logan—because they were such babies, caused their own problems, and then wouldn’t own up to any of it at all.

They also usually had even higher-up friends that would bail them out of trouble, so they could do even more shit, while they blamed the middle class that had had nothing to do with it.

And in this case, they were even hurting a person from the lower class.

Max had no idea how much they were asking for from Sketchy in court. But seeing as how they were pampered people, she wouldn’t be surprised if they’d made the price go up and up. And Sketchy didn’t look like he could even pay one cent of it.

Hell, he even looked like he was about to have a panic attack, even more than Max herself had had when dealing with Ben’s insanity.

So she decided right then and there that she was going to help him.

She really wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was just glad that he hadn’t recognized her, and gone crazy over her, while the media was painting her as some sort of superhuman.

Maybe she remembered her theory—somewhat confirmed by both Ben and Tinga—that Ben wanted her to bring happiness to the world somehow, and Max now meant to do that in the right way.

Whatever the reason, Max ended up promising Sketchy she’d get him out of his ordeal, and she ended up dragging Logan into it to do so.

“These people probably have a video camera to record anything unseemly that happens in their home, right? Well, those things can be hacked into—and I think I know someone who can do it—so we’ll find when the girl took her starter earrings out, thus infecting her ears that way, post it online anonymously, and then the court will have to use that evidence and let you go. Don’t worry, Sketchy. I’ll get you out of this.”

 _So I can at least do one good thing in my life_.

And Sketchy looked so happy and relieved, that Max didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was a slim chance the court wouldn’t buy this—as video footage could be tampered with—but since it was about something as simple as earrings and infected ears, she was hoping for the best.

…

When Max got back to her apartment, she was surprised to see Zack and Syl there. She even thought about throwing the bag she’d been carrying over her shoulder at Zack, if this was going to be some sort of ploy of his to make her jealous, or something.

But then he started talking, and all of Max’s preconceptions went out the window.

“Max… At the hospital, I was trying to get things in order, to defend you, should the government have found out Ben was behind it all, and have wanted to arrest you for that.

“But then… But then something ended up happening that I don’t think either of us could’ve seen coming: They thought you saved a number of people, instead: When that doesn’t even really fit with what transpired there at all, so…

“So I wanted to apologize for taking up some of your precious time, when you should have been spending it with your family that first day, for nothing.”

The whole time Zack had been talking, Max hadn’t known what she should do. She’d thought long and hard about beating him up, for perhaps having played her since the first time they’d met.

She also had thought about running, or maybe trying to deny his claims.

But now when he said that his biggest concern had been wasting her time—and he apparently wasn’t even thinking of telling anyone about any of this—she couldn’t help from tittering, which was something she never would’ve guessed would happen in a situation like this.

Really, Max knew that she probably should’ve been still trying to denounce Zack’s claim, but she didn’t have the energy to do so anymore.

She was just so tired.

“That’s really why you came over here, Zack?” Max asked, as she walked over to her fridge to get out a shepherd’s pie someone had left for her to eat.

She made certain to keep her eye on Syl as she worked, though, as that friend of hers had the least reason to be here, she thought.

“You’ve gotta stop thinking so much of other people.” _Of me_ , Max thought. “Just think what you could get if you sold this information to the highest bidder. You’re a riot, Zack. A riot.”

And as she heard the incredulousness in her own voice at the end of that sentence, she had to wonder if maybe she was now pretending with Zack, after all.

“That’s just it, Max,” Syl said then—surprising them both, it looked like.

And so waiting for the other shoe to drop, she found herself savoring the pie as much as she possibly could.

If she was about to be carted off to prison, after all, who knew if she’d ever get food like this again? And even more than that… deliciously flavored pie.

Suddenly, Max found herself indignant that her former co-worker from work hadn’t brought her some apple pie instead.

“Zack _isn’t_ being nice. Rather, I’m going to tell you something you may have a hard time believing—and that may end up changing your bearings completely, and I’m sorry for that, but…

“In another time and place, you and I were soldiers together. And I know, you’re looking at me like I’m insane now, Max, but it’s true. Somehow I got here, but I remember the other place—I remember the other you—the traumas I got from there remind me of my past when it would be all too easy to just think it was a lie.

“And I’ll… I’ll never forget how much you wanted to kill Renfro.”

It was all too much for Max. She felt the world spinning around her, and it would have been too easy to give in then, as Syl was saying, and let unconsciousness take her.

But Max had been working her entire life to fight against the simple way out, hadn’t she? And so she balanced herself on the granite counter in front of her—to which she got a small, sympathetic smile from Syl—and she continued listening, trying to see how this made sense with Logan’s story or not.

“So I… I can’t help thinking that the reason they’re perceiving you as a hero, and seem to have seen things that didn’t happen—according to you, when you were drugged and talking in your sleep—is because somehow they’re seeing that other time that still exists? The time when you and I were soldiers together? I don’t know.”

_Except that the problem is no one else sees it. No one except for Logan and me. People are praising me but, not because they actually know stuff, but because they don’t want to imagine the true scenario and want to believe in something good, I guess._

Sighing, Max came and took a seat in front of Syl, holding onto the other girl’s—that she’d now admit she’d been jealous of before, it was true—hand.

Zack, meanwhile, was watching like a hawk—trying to make sure that she wouldn’t abuse Syl for this, Max assumed.

And here she’d thought that Zack had been doing everything for her all along, when really he had been all about Syl.

It was nice to know he had some balls, and that he wasn’t still wound too tightly by his ex, even if it did make Max the tiniest bit sad.

“It’s not that the things you’re saying are impossible, Syl… I’ve heard some stuff about alternate universes recently, alright? But… what you’re saying kind of seems at odds with what I know to be right.

“And I can’t ever imagine—in this world or the next— _ever_ joining the military. Just shoot me now, please.”

Max wouldn’t admit that she, despite her best efforts to the contrary, could see herself hating someone so much she’d want to murder them, though.

And even moreso… if Syl was talking about a drill sergeant as tough as the one her grandfather had had…. Well, he’d wanted to kill his own instructor, so perhaps it ran in the family.

Max… Max also wouldn’t admit that—now that Syl had brought it up—she could somewhat imagine herself inching on the ground under barbed wire, using only her elbows.

“Max,” Zack suddenly hissed, bringing Max out of her reverie, as he seemed to be absentmindedly writing the names for deliveries on a notepad he’d confiscated from her.

Before Normal had worked at the mall, and had been her instructor there, he had actually worked as a delivery man—Zack being his star pupil—so sometimes when Zack got agitated, he flashed back to that.

Max prepared herself for Zack to now angrily read her the riot act, and she found herself wanting to call Logan just to make it all go away.

“Don’t be so dismissive about this. This is Syl’s life she was just kind enough to share with you. She didn’t have to tell you anything at all!”

Max had had enough.

Getting to her front door, and kicking it open with such force it probably left an indention on the massive wall behind it, she said, “You can get out now, Zack. I’ve been through a lot lately, and I won’t have you taking that tone with me in my own house, thank you very much.

“It may be Syl’s reality, but modern science says that we all have our own reality, so excuse me if I don’t view hers as mine.”

And only when Zack was out the door—giving Max a look of pure hatred as he vacated the premises—did Max turn back to Syl:

“Despite what I just said to Zack, I don’t want to write off your story entirely. Do you have any proof at all, Syl? Anything you can give me?”

“Yep. There was… there was someone who was actually in the same squadron as us. Someone that you know. His name was Krit.”

Max let out a small gasp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I love how all three of my siblings in this (Tinga, Benjamin, and Maxine, that is) all have the letters “I” and then “N” somewhere in their names:)
> 
> Also, I’ve mentioned before that Tinga is Max and Ben’s half-sister (which is why she’s part Chinese and looks different from then), but honestly…
> 
> Ben and Max don’t look like each other that much, despite being full-blooded siblings, and I have no solution for that one. Just pretend that Ben kind of looks like Max, and is Puerto Rican, I guess…
> 
> And the thing about the character “Anathriel” is another reference to the book “Awakenings”:D


End file.
